Constant Contact’s email marketing solutions have taken a step into the world of social networking.  You can now integrate your event marketing to create some synergy between email, event marketing and your social network, offering you a solution that simplifies the promotion, management and communication with event invitees and attendees.

If you have been using Constant Contact to generate email marketing campaigns to advertise your events you’ll like this.  You can now let your readers register and pay for the event within your email message.  Even better, you can send information directly as a Twitter feed and your readers can tell their Facebook friends they just registered for your event.

They offer an integrated ticketing system which gives marketers the option to create and distribute actual tickets to events that can be printed.   Guest registration functionality has also been added and offers the ability for registratants to register one or more guests, limit the number of guests each registrant can bring, assign different event fees for members and non-members, and allows registrants to pay for the event.  Other features include the ability to post event information directly to a Twitter feed and tell friends in FaceBook.

The cost is $10 a month if you already have an email marketing subscription and you only have to pay the month you use the service.  Now there’s an easy way to connect your social network and your events together doing what you already do with your email marketing campaigns.

Among the most important factors affecting your SEO results is the number and quality of links that point to your site. The better your content, the more people will link to you. Google essentially looks at inbound links as “votes” of love for your site- if you have a lot of quality links, your content must be good, thus they should move it up the results. Not long ago reciprocal link exchange on a links pages (you post a link to their site and they post a link to your site) was the easiest way to gain love from the search engines. Blatant reciprocal link exchange is no longer a show of love so what can you do?

With some good planning and a bit of work you can still get the love from other sites by way of “Link Bait”. The best strategy to gain the love is putting your energy into creating useful, valuable content that people will read, use, bookmark, link to, and recommend to others.

Share the love – link out. Although linking out to other sites carries the risk of sending people away, the benefits of being associated with high-level content should outweigh any negatives. Would you expect others to link to you if you don’t link to anyone else? Are you really a good authority if you don’t reference any other good information? Link out usefully and don’t overdo it and make sure you are linking to solid, reputable sites and content. You can search “seo bad neighborhoods” to learn more about site reputation.  You can reduce some of the readership loss by opening the link in a new window.

Now you have good content and you have links pointing to other sites. Notify the site owners of these love links which reference their site and inform them about your great content. Let them know they can return the love with links to your content.

If you have a self-hosted Word Press blog or website there are a few plugins which can help you easily share your content.

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated. The larger your ping list the higher the chances of receiving traffic from those sources, Wordpress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing.  To get a current list of the Ping services just search the web for a list but be sure to use the most up to date list you can find.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer will help you manage the pings to other blogs.  Be sure to add a plugin such as this one which limits the ping to one time per blog post, otherwise you may be banned from the blog directory for submission when you edit the post.

Blog Traffic Exchange has a free and pro version.  Basically you join a group of websites which post links on each others related blog posts.  The software takes care of determining which post’s topics relate to one another so it’s automated for you.  Your posts join the pool and receive a posting on related sites.

With time the love will come back to you with inbound links referencing your great and lovable content.