Crowded niches can be extremely difficult to get started in but also happen to be the most interesting and most lucrative. Whether you have a passion and want to write about it, have a business in a crowded niche you need to promote, or simply want to make money, it takes lots of time and persistence but it can be done.

For a brand new website, optimizing for local search can be the first and easiest way to get relevant traffic. There are plenty of ways of driving traffic to websites but local search is best for small businesses looking to use their websites to gain new clients or sales. The traffic won't be staggering but will be highly relevant which ultimately is what is important.

There are a lot of designers out there, which means there are lots of design portfolios on the web. Yours is one of millions. Which means it will never be found on it’s own. But because the design community is so massive, there are plenty of opportunities to self promote.

For whatever reason, I'm really late to the Twitter game. But I've been studying up and see what works and what doesn't. And much of what doesn't is what a lot of people are doing. So here are some tips to improve your Twitter usage.

When starting a new blog or trying to improve an existing one, it is often difficult to gage the success of your posts. The most obvious indicator would be traffic, but often even that can be misleading. I've put together some of the ways I measure post success here for you. The best part about these measurements is they work for blogs with smaller amounts of traffic. Not only that but they can be applied to competitors blogs to see how they are doing as well, without seeing their Analytics. Or to gage how your guest post stacked up against other posts on a site.

Facebook is the 800lb. guerilla on the social media stage. They are making a killing from their targeted ads and every business MUST have a Facebook page these days. But is that really the case. I'll go over the benefits of using Facebook and some of the reasons it may in fact be a waste of time for most if not all businesses.

One of the wonderful thing about the Internet is that anyone can voice their opinion or start up a business. Put up a little website or blog and share what you know with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the little voices out there get drowned out by the big boys on the block, to the point where many people wanting to share something with the world are really just talking to themselves.

Social media has become one of the primary ways webpages get traffic these days and allowing users to "spread the good word" about your site is equally important. AddThis.com is a free service that easilly implements social media links of your choosing into your website.

The social media battle is on. Facebook is way out ahead but Google + has started to really grow now that is has gone live. Is there enough room for two similar social networks or will one win out?

There are simply a ton of different social media outlets to choose from today and trying to use them all, especially if you are a one man/woman/other crew. It is best to narrow it down to 1-2 and I’ll go over the best way to do that.