The retailing industry has discovered the power of social media to sell its products. JC Penney and Sears, for example, are using easy to play online games as a way to promote their clothing lines By using methods such as online games and Flash-based advertisements, companies are better able to reach their desired consumer bracket, teenagers. This, in turn, creates an overall brand awareness that is stronger than traditional televised or print ads. The end result is more sales and better, more qualified customers.

Yahoo has finally allowed mainstream access to their Digg competitor Buzz. Previously, Buzz was only available to a hundred or so specially selected users. Like Digg, Buzz allows you to vote for your favorite stories and articles, with the highest ranking stories appearing on the Yahoo main page. Many analysts believe that Buzz will bring more users to Yahoo. In the closed beta, stories that were deemed to be Buzzworthy were viewed more often than the other stories.

One of the most important things that you can do as a new business owner is to understand the needs of your potential clients. The easiest and, some might argue, most cost-effective, way of doing this is with a survey. For those of you who wish to harness the power of a survey but don’t have the time to write and conduct one yourself, there’s Frogmetrics. Frogmetrics transforms the surveying process into a simple, three-question quiz. Each quiz takes only seconds to take, and is full of invaluable information concerning your business. Simple and effective, Frogmetrics shows how wonderful three little questions can be.

As many fans of the Free Line know, it’s always a good idea to make your site search engine friendly. If your site is built upon a database, then you know that this is easier said than done. Don’t worry, because Mark Stubbs feels your pain and wants to help. In “Ten SEO Mistakes Made By Database Driven Websites,” Stubbs not only describes the problems that many webmasters deal with when it comes to SEO, but explains what the root causes are as well. This article is full of great advice for everyone, even those who don’t employ a database in their site’s structure.

In high school, popularity was gauged by word-of-mouth. In politics, popularity is gauged by the opinion poll. On the Internet, popularity is at least partially gauged by Socialmeter. Socialmeter scans everything from Delicious to Google Links in order to determine the social popularity of your site. The results are then displayed in an easy-to-read bar graph.