Give Your Career Search a Boost With Blogging

Article By Allen Voivod

Even if you're not looking for a job right now, it might be time to consider starting your own blog.

I've been reading Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and it's got advice that's helpful not just to businesses, but to professionals as well. Specifically:

* C-level executives

* Senior managers

* Mid-career professionals, and

* Anyone business person with lots of experience to draw from and share with an online audience

If Google is not just a search engine, but a "reputation management system," as you'll read in the book, then using a blog is vital to you as an expert and executive in your field.

When a headhunter or recruiter gets your resume and Googles you - and more and more of them will as time goes on - what will they find?

If you're blogging, they'll find someone who's intensely passionate about their industry, their vocation, their business savvy. And wouldn't that be a great thing for a recruiter to find?Especially in the midst of hundreds of other candidates for a position? Wouldn't a recruiter be able to do wonders for you with that kind of information to share with a target company?

Not to mention how good it's going to make the recruiter look in front of their client on the employer side of things. So you land a great job, the employer gets a great addition to their team, and the recruiter looks great in the process. It's one of those rare situations where everyone wins.

In addition, a blog is a great networking tool, "a way to connect with other like-minded professionals," as Lani Voivod at "The 'A-Ha!' Blog" puts it. It's just one more way of extending your network, and well beyond the local business groups you may already frequent.

Need more convincing? GoDaddy's CEO Bob Parsons blogs. So does Bill Marriott - yes, he of the hotel chain. The GM FastLane Blog is a team effort which includes Vice Chairman Bob Lutz and other GM VPs, executives, and general managers. And those are just three of the bigwig blogs. You could be in there, too.

To learn more about blogging as a business person, an executive or manager, check out Naked Conversations, and also have a look at "BlogWriteForCEOs," Debbie Weil's excellent website for corporate blogging resources.

Then take a crack at your own blog - once a month to start, work your way up to once a week, then maybe twice or three times, and enjoy yourself while you blog your way to a new position.

About the Author:

Allen Voivod is the Chief Blogger for ResumeMachine.com, the leading resume distribution resource for managers, executives, and professionals looking to accelerate their job search results. Get the attention of thousands of hiring agents with the largest and most frequently updated recruiter database on the web, and dive into a wealth of immediately useful career articles and blog posts - all at http://www.ResumeMachine.com !

Why Online Businesses Should Be Blogging

By Kalena Jordan

Last weekend my husband and I were having a conversation with some friends over a bottle of wine. The wine was a delectable New Zealand chardonnay and the friends were a husband and wife team who run a small but highly successful web/graphic design firm.

The conversation veered towards blogging and whether or not it was a viable marketing activity for online businesses. My friend Wendy was lamenting that most of her clients couldn’t see the value in blogging. An avid blog reader herself, she could see it had value but she wasn’t sure whether it would work for her clients or how to implement it in a way that would be worthwhile for her own online business.

I suggested that she start a blog about environmentally-sustainable business, as this is her company’s unique selling proposition and something she is particularly passionate about. I think a lot of small businesses would like to take steps to be more environmentally responsible but aren’t sure where to start. A blog about the subject could gain readership quickly and also gain attention for her own company.

This led to a discussion about what types of businesses would benefit from a blog and what THEY could blog about. The potential number of blog niches and opportunities we thought of was incredible. Here are just some of the ideas we came up with:

1) Web Design Firms could blog about:
Unique business practices
Customer success stories
Web site tips
Staff success stories
Web site usability issues

2) Travel Related Businesses could blog about:
Last minute travel deals
Customer travel stories
Staff travel stories
Travel tips
Flight details
Breaking news in the travel industry


3) Government agencies could blog about:
Changes to Government regulations
Communication between Government agencies and the public
Government issues and news
Legislation affecting various industries

4) Marketing agencies could blog about:
Marketing trends
Successful client case studies
How to reach different target audiences
Tips for marketing offline and online
How to create effective marketing campaigns

5) Retail businesses could blog about:
Products and services
Customer service issues
Special offers and discounts
Industry news
Product recalls

6) Sport-related sites could blog about:
Latest game results and scores
Team news and updates
Individual team member diaries
Nutrition and weight loss/gain

7) Public relations and advertising firms could blog about:
Advertising trends
Successful client case studies
Press release writing
Successful advertising campaigns
How to deal with the media
How to create effective advertisements

8) Telecommunications firms could blog about:
Industry trends
Products and services
Communication legislation
Tips for getting the most out of phones and related equipment


9) Law firms could blog about:
Understanding contracts
Case histories
Tips for court appearances
Understanding legal jargon
Court and case schedules

10) Insurance firms could blog about:
Changes/updates to premiums
News of insurable events (e.g. flood, fire)
Tips for protecting your house from burglary
Tips for getting the most from your premiums
Fire prevention tips

The entire discussion made me realize that blogging is not the answer for every business and in fact, some companies should steer clear of it. But for the majority of online businesses, particularly small businesses, there ARE terrific incentives to blog.

Blogging can provide unprecedented opportunities for new business, media exposure, networking, traffic, customer feedback and interaction. Plus business blogs don’t have to be boring. Just glance at the topic range of some of the most successful business blogs, based on Technorati rankings:

Kotaku – a blog for gamers and persons working in the video gaming industry.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog – news and views relating to Apple Macintosh business and products.
The Pharma Marketing Blog – a blog for persons in the pharmaceutical marketing industry.
TechCrunch – a blog that profiles and reviews new Internet products and companies.
Advertising for Peanuts – a consumer’s guide to advertising and media.
The Consumerist – consumer rights blog where people can lodge complaints about products and businesses.
TreeHugger – a blog trying to bring environmental sustainability to mainstream business and media.
Construction Marketing Ideas – Information and ideas for marketing and promoting construction-related businesses.

Business blogging does take time and commitment, but the rewards are well worth the investment.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Business Blog Savvy: Avoiding the 8 Pitfalls of Do-It-Yourself Blogging

By Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D. and Denise Wakeman

The Blog Squad

You can pat yourself on the back if you're one of the thousands of small business professionals that have set up a blog to communicate with your potential clients. Or, maybe you haven't started your business blog yet, but intend to. Take note now so you can avoid some of the consequences of do-it-yourself blogging.

You've heard all the hype, listened to a few podcasts and teleseminars, and finally sorted out for yourself how blogging can really work for your targeted niche of readers and potential clients. You've set up your business blog.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "If I'm so smart at my business, why do I have a dumb do-nothing blog?"

Here are a few of the pitfalls of creating your blog without any guidance from blogging experts:

1. You don't know how to use your blogging software, yet you expect to look like an expert and build credibility. How could you know? Blogs haven't been around that long, and the blogging software is continually being upgraded. You need to learn how to use your blog features that increase your findability on the Internet and readership. For example, you need to regularly use trackback, pinging, and permalinks features.

2. You are writing in a vacuum, without knowing what questions your clients want answered. You haven't done any keyword research, or asked your current clients what they'd like to read. Even worse, you under the impression that a blog should be like an online diary. You are writing about your personal life and details, detracting from the on-target, focused purpose of your blog as a business building tool.

3. You haven't researched other blogs in your field, or spent any time on them, leaving comments. You need to get out there and raise your hand in the blogosphere, so people
will know you're there. You also need to know what's going on in your field.

4. You haven't put a subscription form on your blog, and you don't understand the whole RSS feed thingy. Your readers can't find you or know when you have updated your blog.

5. You haven't put any images on your blog and your blog doesn't look as neat and tidy as your business is. It doesn't reflect your business image or brand.

6. You haven't put any content-appropriate ads on your blog, that don't distract from your own products. Your blog has a non-professional, non-business look and feel to it.

7. You haven't used categories for your blog posts and your readers are confused about wide-ranging subjects you write about. What is your core message? What is the focus of your blog? And important question you must answer for your readers: What's in your blog for them?

8. You haven't written anything for a month. When you've got a blog that has lack-luster traffic, your enthusiasm for writing begins to wane. Why bother posting, if no one is reading your words of wisdom? Then your blog slips even further, and begins to look like a ghost town. Worse, it's still up on the Web, and people will find you and decide you maybe don't care, went out of business, or changed your mind.

Here's what is promised by having a blog:

- Search engines will find you better - website trafficgalore
- Instant credibility in your area of expertise
- A way to communicate with people interested in your field
- Dialogue through comments with potential clients
- Increased sales of your products, whether tangible goods, informational products, or services

How could you possibly know the most effective blogging strategies and tactics without learning and guidance by experts? Sure, blogs are for everyone and the software makes it easy and cheap for anyone to start a blog.

But a professional business blog that drives traffic and gets clients must be optimized correctly and treated as a valuable marketing strategy.

Here are some solutions:

1. Study the professional business blogs in the blogosphere and model their strategies.
2. Buy an ebook on how to set up and optimize a professional business blog
3. Take an advanced course in blogging (not one that just tells you how to get a free account and set it up, but one to explain how to optimize for business.)
4. Hire a team of professional blog experts to coach you in using your blog for your business.
5. Hire a business blog consultant team to help you tweak your blog, or do an extreme makeover
6. Delete your blog and start all over again

Blogs are an effective and powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes and types. Like any tool, though, you need to know how to use it correctly to maximize your results.

About the Author:

As the The Blog Squad, Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman have teamed up to work with professionals to maximize their marketing strategies by implementing blogs, ezines and ecommerce tactics. They have co-authored "Build a Better Blog: The Ultimate Guide for Boosting Your Business with a Professional Blog." Take The Blog Squad's free assessment to find out if you're ready for a business blog: http://snipurl.com/Blog_Assessment

Internet Marketing - What Comes First?

By Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D.

Someone asked me recently, if I were to expand an existing professional services business onto the internet, what marketing steps would I take first: set up a web site, a shopping cart, a newsletter, or a blog?

This is a very good question. Five years ago most Internet marketing specialists would have all responded in chorus, "A website, of course!" Then they would recommend their services to create an elaborate website with lots of bells and whistles.

I had an interesting email this week from a reader who asked me about website design fees. This is not my area of expertise. But this reader is a very smart guy. Why? Because he knows from my ezines, blogs and web site that I've been online for a few years and making a decent living from it.

He's a rabbi who has many years experience counseling people. He now has made a wise decision to start offering coaching services to people, and wants to leverage the internet to find clients, sell ebooks and other programs.

The First Step - Ask Questions

He has many questions about what to do first, where to invest his marketing dollars, and how to get set up so everything works seamlessly and automatically.

While I don't profess to have all the answers to his particular questions, I want to emphasize what's important here. He is asking questions!

Many people just go with their gut or common sense. It goes something like this:

"I need a way to find people online. Ergo, I need a web site. Who can do a web site for me, that doesn't cost too much? Oh, you can? Only $1000. Okay, that seems reasonable. Do it."

It's only later on down the road when they want to start an ezine, or a blog, or sell an ebook that they realize they need more than just a web site. That's when the web designer kicks in with hourly fees.

I've never heard a programmer say they can't do something. They always say they can easily set up autoresponders, gather email addresses, send out a newsletter, create a blog on your site, and even create a secure payment system for sales. I'm sorry, but here's the real news: programmers and web site designers can do all these tasks with your web site, but they will charge you for it, and it still won't do everything automatically. And you will be tied to their hourly fees (and schedule) forever.

Back to the question asked of me at the beginning of this article.

While my partner and I recommend an all-in-one solution and setting up all the elements together if your budget permits, there are a couple of ways to get started.

Unless you have a database of prospects, you will not sell your services or products. Therefore, we recommend getting started the right way by building your database - by offering an ezine or free content to attract people to your business. And, you need a place on the Internet where people can find you and subscribe to your content.

The first two pieces then, especially if you're just starting out and have a limited budget, are a blog and a shopping cart program with an autoresponder system.

Third Party Shopping Cart Systems

A third party shopping cart system is where you get an account hosted online by a company that specializes in providing automated database management, autoresponders, email broadcasting, online merchant credit card and payments, ad tracking, and affiliate programs.

When you start out, all you need to do is deliver your ezine and automated emails through autoresponders. You can get a basic level shopping cart account. As your business grows and you develop products, you can upgrade to get more features on your shopping cart, such as affiliate program management and digital delivery.

There are many online email broadcasting services to manage your newsletter. But be aware that an all-in-one solution such as a shopping cart program will save you time and money in the long run.

We strongly recommend starting off with a shopping cart program that can manage your database and newsletters under one roof. It is better to have all your automated marketing functions with one service provider, than to separate your database and newsletter out to another external email service provider.

For detailed information and questions to ask about how to pick a shopping cart system, there are a series of articles you can review: http://snipurl.com/Pick_a_Cart

What's next?

You have your shopping cart system, now what? We'll explore the issue of websites vs. blogs in our next article.

About The Author

As the The Blog Squad, Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman have teamed up to work with professionals to maximize their marketing strategies by implementing blogs, ezines and
ecommerce tactics. They are co-authors of "Secrets of Successful Ezines: A Guide to Writing and Publishing an Ezine that Gets Results." Get The Blog Squad's free report on the "Top 10 Reasons to do an Ezine and A Blog": http://snipurl.com/Ezine_Blog

Internet Marketing: Start Right, Start Smart

By Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D.

Internet Marketing: Start Right, Start Smart

When a professional or small business owner decides to launch their business on the Internet, they often start with a website. They've heard that everybody has to have a website. Then they learn that they should have an email newsletter.

Many people start out piece-meal. Website with one company, newsletter delivery with another provider, online payments with another, and as each need arises they get an account with a new provider. In a previous article (http://snipurl.com/Internet_Marketing1), we recommended starting with a shopping cart marketing system. The next step is to establish your online presence.

Website First, Blog First?

As stated above, it wasn't long ago that you would get started with your online business by creating a website. However, after several months and several thousands of dollars you may learn your website isn't enough. You do need a web presence, and there is an alternative to hiring a web designer to do it for you - you can create a blog for your business.

Since the invention of easy-to-use blogging programs, we recommend to many small businesses and professionals to skip a website, and start off with a blog. A blog can do just about anything a website can, and has several big advantages. (A blog actually is a website, only its software provides for easily updated content and reader participation.)

1. A blog is user-friendly. You can learn how to manage it yourself, no need to hire a web designer, pay big fees or be at the mercy of their busy schedule.

2. A blog is inexpensive. An account at Typepad.com, the leading blog provider, runs from $5-$15/month.

3. Blogs are search engine friendly. Even if in the beginning you don't have a clue about how to optimize your site for the search engines, don't worry. Just know that when you are writing about your niche, to your targeted audience, you will be using the very same keywords that get entered into Google when people are searching for things. This will increase your chances of getting found on the 'Net' by the people who want and need you. Websites are a little more complicated and if they aren't updated frequently, they don't get indexed by the search engine spiders very often.

Huh? What's a Spider?

Don't worry about the technological jargon. You don't have to understand how a blog and search engines work right now. But you do have to know that these elements are "must-do's" for anyone who wants to use the Internet to build and grow a business online.

Take some teleseminars - there are plenty and they're often free - or, buy a couple of ebooks that show you how to manage these tasks.

Don't make the mistake of getting overwhelmed by all the possibilities and all the companies trying to sell you their services. Start out slowly, ask questions, gather information, inform yourself about the options and benefits before you even think about setting up your website or blog. While we can't really make recommendations for you without knowing about your business niche, in general, you can't go wrong by setting up a shopping cart and a blog so you can start your business online the smart way. The two go hand in hand. If you want to make money online, you can't have one without the other.

About The Author.

As the The Blog Squad, Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman have teamed up to work with professionals to maximize their marketing strategies by implementing blogs, ezines and
ecommerce tactics. They are co-authors of "Build a Better Blog: The Ultimate Guide for Boosting Your Business with a Professional Blog." Are you ready for a blog? Take The Blog Squad's free assessment at http://snipurl.com/Blog_Assessment

15 Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

By David Riewe

There are many factors that make blogs much better than normal WebPages including the speed at which blogs are indexed, ability to submit to blog directories & normal directories, pings and track backs. All these little things can help drive more traffic to blogs. Here are 15 popular techniques you can use:

1.) Create at least four keyword posts per day. Most of the top blogs such as Boing Boing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit (with literally tens of thousands of visitors per day) publish an average of 30 small 100-150 word posts per day according to "Secrets of the A-list Bloggers: Lots of Short Posts" by http://TNL.net

2.) Submit to My Yahoo! When you submit your own RSS to My Yahoo it is indexed by Yahoo.

3.) Submit to Google's Reader. When you submit your own blog RSS to Google's Reader the Google Blog Search will index your site.

4.) Add a relevant link directory to your blog and trade links like a demon possessed! Although it may take more time than simply submitting to a search engine one time, this method is perhaps the best way to drive traffic to your site. Use software such as Zeus to speed up the link trading process.

5.) Use ping sites like ping-o-matic. Ping your site every time you add a new post.

6.) Submit your blog to traditional search engines such as AltaVista, and MSN.

7.) Submit your blog to traditional directories such as DMOZ. Directories (particularly DMOZ) increase relevance with Google. DMOZ is very picky, but what do you have to lose by trying?

8.) Submit to as many RSS Directories and Search Engines as possible. This is a simple but repetitive process that can be done with software such as RSS SUBMIT.

9.) Comment on other blogs. Do not just leave short, lazy comments like "I agree." Leave well thought out replies that will force readers to wonder "who wrote this?"

10.) Use track backs. If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site.

11.) Go offline. Use newspaper ads, public bulletin boards, business cards, even stickers to let as many people as possible know your blog exists.

12.) Ad a link to your blog in your e-mail signature block.

13.) Use Groups (Usenet). Find a relevant group on Google groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups or any of the thousands of other FREE group services and find like minded people and talk with them. Make sure your use your blog URL like it is your name.

14.) Use Forums. Forums are one of the best places to go for advice. Go to forums and find problems to solve. Make sure you leave your blog name, but be tactful about it; some forums get annoyed with those who selfishly drop a few links to their own site and leave.

15.) Tag your website. Tagging is a new idea that has erupted across the web. Sites like http://Del.icio.us, Technorati and many others have a social feature that allows you to place your article under keywords or "tags" that everyone interested in that tag can see.

Although these are some of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your blog, do not limit your self to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

About The Author:

David Riewe - Internet Marketer and Publisher
http://www.free-online-course.com

How is Yahoo using your RSS feed?

By Robert Fuess

The format for the site submission has changed in the free Yahoo web submissions http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request . At first it allowed you to submit your site to it using the free submission form. This was normally the home page, and you would hope that their spider would crawl the rest of your website from there. Some webmasters have found this inadequate and have submitted other pages that Yahoo failed to notice otherwise.

More recently Yahoo allowed you to put in a text document with a list of URL's to simplify the submission process.

A few weeks ago I noticed that Yahoo also allows RSS feeds of your website, Atom feeds, or a text listing of urls in this submission form. What does this mean? What will Yahoo do with the links in the RSS feed?

The text list of URL's was obviously an effort to simplify the process for Yahoo to find all the pages in a website, as their documentation describes. But the RSS? Will they just add this to their database of RSS feeds for RSS searches, or will they follow the links with their spider to evaluate all the pages listed?

I have been working with Google Sitemaps since they came out. (Google uses their XML-formatted Google Sitemaps to help discover all the pages in a website, as well as to evaluate what pages have changed recently.) I am wondering if this is Yahoo's response to the Google Site Maps. Does anyone know? http://www.spiderweblogic.com/GoogleSitemap.aspx

If I was them, then I would use RSS feeds to evaluate changes in the website. This has more information than the list of URL's, since it also has descriptions and date changed. They have all the right information. If this is the case, it would be advisable for webmasters to have a RSS feed for their whole site to submit. That way Yahoo could just check the feed and know what pages to re-crawl, or what pages have been added.

It could be just as possible that this is just a field for us to submit RSS feeds, in addition to the other pages in your website. If this is the case, then we may need to submit both the feed and the home page of the website.

For myself, unless I find out differently, I am going to submit both. I intend on having a Google Sitemap and a RSS feed on all my future websites. I think it is safest to help out the search engines in any way possible. If they want information on what files have changed, I want to be proactive in giving it to them.

In addition, for those who have the coding experties, it is advisable to automate pinging Yahoo when your RSS feed changes. This is a standard blogging technique.

If you use movable type, the following article will help you configure your Yahoo to be automatically notified of a change in your RSS feed: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001490.html .

There is an alternate way, for those who don't have movable type or standard blogs. Lets say you want Yahoo to know about the RSS feed you built for http://www.yourdomainurl.com and have the RSS file, myRss.xml. You could automate (or even have a web shortcut for) the following HTTP request:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.yourdomainurl.com/myRss.xml

For more information, see the official Yahoo documention on RSS here: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide

About the Author:

Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes
in making dynamic search engine optimized websites.
http://www.SpiderwebLogic.com http://www.SchoolAndTeacher.com

Kick Start Your Internet Online Home Based Business With Blogging

By John Woon

A weblog, or more popularly known as "blog", is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

The popularity of blog is gaining momentum globally with each passing month. A recent survey conducted by Comscore.com shows the following findings:

1. 50 million of the population in the USA visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005.
2. This indicates an increase of about 45% compared to First Quarter of 2004.
3. An average blog visitor spends 23 hours per week online while an average Internet user spends only 13 hours online.
4. Blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average Internet users to have incomes of $75,000 or more.
5. Blog visitors are 30% more likely to buy products or services online.

Anybody thinking of starting an online venture, would be silly not to recognise the importance of blogging being one of the best tools of Internet marketing.

Blogging is a perfect way for the average person to make money online without going through all the troubles and frustration of learning how to set up a website and be an efficient internet marketer.

Let's now talk about nich products. Why do you need a niche product? And what has this to do with "blogging"? You may ask. It is because your online business has little hope of succeeding if you're going head to head with the big boys. As a small Internet entrepreneur, you can never hope to compete with the big boys in terms of the power of pricing strategy and advertising. But you can be successful by finding niche markets or niche products that you seldom find at your local mall in order to stay away from the empowering presence of the big guys.

Niche market basically is a market with a significant amount of interest online that does not encounter the same competition as in other regular products. You can easily create a niche market based on any topics including even your own hobbies, e.g. gardening, guitar, tropical fish, D.I.Y etc. As long as the topic is being searched for online, you would have a great opportunity of making some profit through adding ads to your blog and making some effort in promoting your targeted affiliate programs and products.

Many internet marketing newbies opt for blogs to set up their niche markets because as beginners, they can very easily add pages, images, banners, downloads, ebooks etc to their blogs. Unlike the regular websites, they do not need to worry about having to understand HTML (the website design language)!

Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that is free because you could create your blog almost immediately at no cost compared to the setting up of a conventional website.

Putting information in your blog to help establishing your presence in the Web is now a growing phenomenon. Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to enhance the visibility of your products and services.

With the continuing improvement in software technology, publishing, introducing plug-ins, banners, pictures etc to create a fun and interesting "website" has become a breeze even to those retirees with old and rusty brains.

The more content you add to your blog, the more traffic you get. And you can add these materials almost on a daily basis.

You could get high ranking search engine placement for many internet marketing terms just by designing your posts around certain targeted keywords. This phenomenon is more prominent when handling niche markets due to the lack of competition. Free articles could be easily obtained from many article directories in the web and posted to your blogs for the benefits of your visitors.

There's almost no limit to what you could and want to do with your blog. You can include your ideas, opinions, expertise in your field of work, resumes, home recipes, pictures, audio or video clips, e-books, poetry, products, services, consultations etc., etc.

What are the main differences between a blog and a website then? You may ask.

Most websites are relatively permanent with only occasional updating. With blogs, you could post any new content almost on daily basis. Also, websites are usually less personal as far as their relationship with the visitors is concerned.

How do you start your first step to set up a blog? There are many host services providers you could join. Among the most popular are Blogger.com and LiveJournal.com. You could start with Blogger.com which many newbies find serving their needs just perfectly.

With Blogger.com, posting your web content is like a breezy walk in the park. Photographs of your produces etc, along with any text, could be uploaded to your blog right away with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Another facility you could use is Audioblogger that enables audio posting to your current blog site with any phone at any time from any place. It is not only effective but also easy and fun. You call a given number, record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your recorded audio. Your message in your own voice is instantly posted! The beautiful part of it all is the fact that this is totally free of charge!

Blogging has been used for some years as a platform for individuals to record chronological publication of comments and thoughts on the web. Now we know how one could go beyond this to capitalise the strength of blogging to enhance one's Internet business.

About The Author:

Sung-Liang Woon (John Woon) is a Rubber and Latex Consultant with about 30 years of experience. He enjoys writing, lecturing, travelling, tai chi, playing flamenco guitar and singing. Check this fantastic website to find out how he has ventured into Internet business:
http://www.PlugInProfitSite.com/main-9747 Visit his website http://www.johnwoon.com and take a tour at his Blogs: http://www.blogwithjohnwoon.blogspot.com and
http://lowpricepharmacy.blogspot.com

How To Display An XML Feed On Your Website

By William Lee

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has taken off in a big way. Just as satellite television beams more channels into your home than you can watch, RSS allows to you display an endless amount of other peoples content. Whilst RSS XML feeds are plenty, there's not as much in the way of clear, simple instruction when it comes to making use of those feeds.

If you're one of the webmasters who uses a content management system that makes using RSS XML feeds as simple as specifying a feed URL then you're fortunate in that respect. For others, the options available tend to be offered by developers of the software and the usage instructions provided can often be riddled with technical jargon. Many cry, "Use my feed", but fewer tell you how.

One of the best and easiest ways I've found to show the content from an RSS XML feed on one of my websites is to use a ready made PHP parser. Now, don't worry about what that means, just think of it as somthing that someone has already created; a blackbox that makes it easy for you to use content from RSS feeds and display it on your website.

For this guide, I've used MagpieRSS because it's compact, works well and is distributed under the GPL, which basically means it's free for you to use. Now, MagpieRSS is written in PHP so you'll need a compatible hosting account that allows you to execute PHP scripts.

For the purposes of this guide, I'm assuming you've some level of basic knowledge about websites e.g. you know how to FTP, change file permissions etc. Covering the basics of running a
website is beyond the scope of this article.

Instead, let's cover what are probably the most difficult steps; displaying the content from an RSS feed on your website.

1. Download the latest stable release of MagpieRSS.
2. Extract the contents of the ZIP file onto your computer.
3. The core files you need from the ZIP package are rss_cache.inc, rss_fetch.inc, rss_parse.inc, rss_utils.inc. You'll also need the extlib folder together with the Snoopy.class.inc file inside of it.
4. Create a new file to display your RSS feed. I've called mine, index.php. Inside this file, copy and paste the contents of the file referred to below and save it.
5. Upload all of the files and the folder mentioned in steps 3 and 4 to your hosting account. Put them into the desired location, but ensure that the Snoopy.class.inc file is still within the extlib folder.
6. Then visit the file you created in step 4 using your web browser.

That's the basics of it. Once you've got this far, customising the way you present the content of the feed is relatively easy. Just refer back to the MagpieRSS website for guidance on how to do this.

About The Author:

William Lee is the Internet Marketing Fool (http://www.internetmarketingfool.com). The MagpieRSS website is http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/. The code to copy in step 4 can be found at http://snipurl.com/example_code.

How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.

There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you know that there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There is. It's called article syndication.

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link is included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and check their freshness and quality.

3) Join the email list or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Check your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credit to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.

Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportunity to up sell to your own products or affiliate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to check if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and increase your traffic? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Using Blogs For Affilate And Adsense Profits Combined

By Chris Taylor

How do you set up a blog for effective affilate and Adsense profits?

Here is the low down of how it's done and some of the in's and outs of rss.

For this example I will use web hosting as the affilate product we selling on the blog.

1. Rss is great for getting the robots to visit but it will not get you visitors until

*You have quite a number of pages
*Have decent page rank.

2. Best blog platform. http://www.wordpress.org

3. Blog page - index page.

*A two column blog I find works the best
*The sidebar should be on the right hand of the page for SEO purposes
*Heading for your affiliate reviews shouls be first. something like "In-Dpeth, Top 5 Cheap Hosting Reviews". Two links underneath, one going to reviews and the other to "why our reviews are more relaible than other sites"

4. Reviews of your products.

4 to 10 reviews, make them long and give info of what benefits one product has over the other and a rating for different aspects. Do not put adsense on your reviews page.

This site does it really well - http://www.keywordworkshop.com and it's a blog to boot.

5. Next heading in the sidebar - "Articles"

A link going to current articles followed by a search box for your articles. Each article page is where your Adsense sits and here are some good tips.

*All links including Adsense, one color underlined.
*Research has shown the normal blue and darker blue get's the best hits
*Adsense in the middle and at the end of all your articles. You will get less click troughs with Adsense in the borders

6. Next heading "contact Me"

Blurb. A little confused with all the info, so many choices or an aspect of one of "hosting reviews" (Linked to your review page. Feel free drop me an email any time.. blah blah

Then more headings after this is you wish. "My fav top ten hosting tips articles". "Top 5 Domain Name Website Reviews"? and so on.

The way I see it, is if they are customers coming for information on a given product, service or business area, why not stick some products up and make some more money!

If they are just interested in the articles monetize those with Adsense.

And then if for any reason you have a bad Adsense month, the affilate income is there as a backup.

The final tip is to keep your blogs clean so people can easily find the information they are looking for whether that be a product or articles. Heres one of my article directories as an example.

http://www.thewebtrafficco.com/adb/

About The Author:

Chris Taylor is the director of Catdynamics, an established online company which specializes in all areas of online business implementation, internet marketing and search engine optimization - http://www.catdynamics.com/web-master-affiliate-program.html

Understanding RSS And Its Effect On Viral Marketing

By Seomul Davis

RSS and Viral Marketing:

Viral marketing is one of the most creative ways of promoting a business. It can work wonders for any business although there are certain principles that play a lead role in making viral marketing for business websites so effective. Different businesses use different techniques while applying viral marketing to enhance their visibility and here are some of the best and time-proven techniques that can help your business too.

One way is to create content and share it with other publishers. RSS makes the transfer of content a lot more simple and hassle free. With this ease in sharing content make sure you have a signature in your content so that your link spreads online virally as well to boost your link popularity.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is one of the most valuable technologies available for webmasters, administrators and users. In spite of RSS being such a valuable technology only 12% of users know what RSS is while only 4% have used RSS. So let us try and understand what RSS really is and how it can help you or your business.

RSS is a type of feed that internet users can subscribe to. The RSS feeds updated on a regular basis and mostly distributed in XML format. This helps in creating custom tags. There are quite a few websites, which will have the RSS logo in orange and if you click on the icon, you will get connected to the website's feed.

As far as the content contained in a RSS feed is concerned, it depends largely on the feed that you might be viewing. Most of the RSS feeds consist of a title and a brief portion from the article. RSS is becoming overtly popular with bloggers because in this the headline format comes in automatically.

There are many reasons why bloggers and even regular users are choosing RSS. One of the primary reasons being that using RSS can save time especially on an everyday basis. Let us take an example to understand how it saves time. If you are a technical expert and you visit at least 6 websites on a daily basis to collect information then you probably open each website on a separate browser to look for news items. So in a way, you are visiting them one by one as you can't see all of them together.

On the other hand, if you have RSS, then all you need to do is visit a RSS feed reader or a RSS aggregator and this will help you to instantly identify the websites that have added new articles and these websites will be separated from the ones that don't. Another salient point is that you can see all the past entries using RSS.

If you are visiting only one website but on a regular basis then there are times when you will miss a new article added on the website on one of those days when you didn't visit the website. This is where the RSS fits perfectly. Let us for once imagine that there are 20 websites for which you want to keep tabs then RSS will prove to be truly indispensable.

In order to use the RSS, you will first have to find a feed, the one that you can use. If you are using Mozilla's Firefox then you will be able to find out with ease if a particular website has accessible feed or not. You don't even have to go through the entire webpage looking for an RSS icon. When you open a website on the Firefox, you will see an orange icon on the right side of the navigation/URL bar. If you see the icon then it means that the website has RSS feed.

Click on the orange RSS icon in your Firefox browser and it will ask you where you would like to save the feed. Firefox treats RSS feeds as live bookmarks. Once you have saved the feed, go to the particular folder. The folder will have an expand arrow and you can click on the arrow so that it can show all the new entries that has been added on the website in an ascending order with the latest entry on the top.

There are times when your browser may not find a particular website's feed as not all of them have RSS feeds. This is where you will have to search through the web pages to find any items related to feed. There are some websites that have FeedBurner feed, which normally displays the current feed subscribers for that website. If you find a FeedBurner feed icon then click on it and copy the location of the link.

This is the basic information regarding RSS feeds for all those who want to use it to their benefit personally or for viral marketing purposes.

About The Author:

Seomul Davis is a SEO Services expert with SEO 1 Services a Dallas based search engine optimization company (http://www.seo-1-marketing-services.com) and a frequent contributor on http://www.seo-services-expert.com.

Blog Optimization 101

By Nick Stamoulis

Getting your blog out there and seen is the point, right? You want visitors to see your blog so that they can either click on the ads or click through and buy from your site, otherwise whats the point of the blog, right?

So how to get the blog out there. First is to make sure that blog directories and the blog search engines are picking it up. Also link or claim your blog at the social bookmarking sites. To give all fo this a jump start take a look at the following check up list. If your new to blogging and just setting up a blog these are good starting points. if your blog is not performing the ways it should be then the following tips are good for giving your blog a check up.

• It is extremely important that RSS auto-discovery tags be placed in the header of every page within a website that has feeds available. By doing so you will provide users and search engines alike with a simple method of being notified that you have RSS feed(s) and it will allow immediate subscription without fuss. In contrast simply having a RSS logo hyperlinked with a feed provides little or no benefit and does not provide auto-notification that a feed is available.

Furthermore it is recommended to create a unique auto-discovery tag for each available RSS feed and place them all in the header. If you think you have too many then I would recommend choosing the feeds that are most relevant to the page content.

• A WordPress plugin was noted called the "SEO Title Tag Plugin". This plugin really impressed me because it allows WordPress users to see and individually customize the title tags of every post within the associated blog; without a doubt a powerful capability since title tags play a significant role in rankings.
• If you use paid Press Release services to disseminate your latest company news then it also works to your advantage to create a separate blog specifically used for your press releases. In this regard you can use the associated RSS feed to get some free publicity by submitting it to blog directories and other blog-syndicating properties.
• If you are finding it difficult to get the word out about a particular piece of news then Greg Jarboe has a great idea for you: track down the key bloggers that appear to be driving the news in your industry and contact them with your story.

If your story interests even one of the bloggers and gets published then you could get a massive amount of publicity for zero dollars.

During the presentation of this concept Greg Jarboe utilized a powerful online tool called BuzzLogic to identify which people drove the latest news in key topics. Unfortunately BuzzLogic
appears to be priced well out of the capabilities of many small businesses (at $12,000/yr minimum) so I will provide a very basic free alternative to determining the leaders of a particular topic.

Step 1) Search in your favorite search engine for the particular topic. Within the results separate the blogs from the other content. If you do not find at least 10 bloggers then try search again with different wording for the same topic.

Step 2) Look at each blog individually and look for indications of readership or popularity. For example perhaps one of the website has a Feedburner subscription counter with the blog's current readership OR take the URL of the blog and conduct a backlink check on Yahoo using "linkdomain:www. .com" (without the quotes) to see which blogs have the most inbound links. Sort these blogs according to their popularity.

Step 3) Find contact information on each site and then contact the writer(s) starting with the most trafficked blogs and pitch your news/idea/story.

Note: I am not saying the steps above have anywhere near the quality of results that a full-fledge program like BuzzLogic has but it is certainly a great place to start.

• Promote your latest blog posting by taking advantage of a popular blogger's vanity. Compliment them within your key article (somehow) using their full name and perhaps provide a link back to their website. Chances are that the blogger often keeps an eye on blog postings or sites that utilize their name. When they visit your posting there is a good chance they will read it.

General Blog and Feed Optimization Tips:

1. Providing full text feeds was noted regularly throughout the presentation as a far superior method for creating backlinks and getting found online.
2. Your blog feed should have 20 or more items never the minimum 10.
3. Provide a feed for every category your site/blog offers.
4. Ensure that you create keyword rich blog posts and ensure that your brand is well represented within the text.
5. Ensure the most important keyword/phrase is listed in the blog title.

Optimize Your Blog's Linking Structure For Best Results

1. Provide a listing of the top 10 posts within your site so the stories do not get buried in archives or category pages. If the articles are performing well it is just logical to keep them in plain view to get more mileage from them.
2. Use Tag Clouds and Tag Pages to increase the possible routes to your valuable past content.
3. If you are using WordPress as your blogging tool it is a great idea to install the "Sticky Posts" plugin which allows you to 'stick' an introduction or key post at the top of each category page.

About The Author:

Nick Stamoulis and experts at Brick Marketing provide companies with Internet Marketing services. Nick Stamoulis writes daily in his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Call 877-295-0620 or visit: http://www.brickmarketing.com

Five Quick Tips For Getting Your Blog On The First Page Of Google

By Kevin Sinclair

It is so easy to make money with a blog. Whether the purpose of your blog is to get traffic to your sales page or to sell affiliate products or to get Adsense clicks, getting your blog onto the first page of Google can be done quickly and easily.

Using the following quick tips you could get listed on the first page of Google for some keywords within a month or two, depending on how competitive your niche is. A video game site that followed these tips got on the first page of Google, in the fifth spot, for a popular search term when the site was less than one month old.

Here are the five quick tips for getting to the first page of Google:

1. Put some original content on your blog. Post at least once a day but not more than every two to three hours. It doesn't look good if you are posting every few minutes. Continue adding new content regularly. Some of the content can be duplicate content (from an article directory or private label rights articles) but the more original content the better.
2. When you have at least five posts with original content then submit your blog to Google's sitemap. It's not hard, and it only takes a few minutes. As long as you have a blog that looks authentic and is not filled with scraped content, this is a good start to getting noticed by Google.
3. Write some original articles and submit them to article directories such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleAlley, and SearchWarp. Do not submit more than one a day since it is better to not inundate the article directories or they might think you are spamming them. It is very important to have a good resource box with links back to your site.
4. Submit your RSS feed to at least fifty sites. This can be done in less than a couple of minutes using RSS Submit (RSSFeedsSubmit), a great piece of software that automatically submits your feed to more than fifty sites. The price is very reasonable (less than $50) but if you don't want to spend any money and would rather do it by hand, Robin Good sells a list of 55 RSS submission sites for a very small fee.
5. Get your URL link listed in as many places as possible. Submit your site to directories like DMOZ. Answer questions at answers.yahoo and include your URL with your signature.
   Leave comments on blogs that are in a related niche to yours, again including your URL in the signature. Do a search with the phrase "keyword add url" and add your URL at sites that allow you to do it for free. "Keyword" would be replaced by one of your keywords for your niche. Submit your blog to Technorati. Submit your original posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Netscape, Redit, Plugim, and so on. Be sure to tell friends to vote for your submissions at the social bookmarking sites.

These five quick tips will give your blog a powerful boost and get your blog on the first page of Google in a very short time. Within days you should be getting traffic from Google as you rise in the search engines. And you did it with spending little or no money.

About the Author:

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of Be Successful News, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business. http://besuccessfulnews.com/

How To Market Yourself With A Blog

By Kim Klaver

Fabulous Micropersuasion published the link...

If you are an entrepreneur, and you like writing, blogging could help grow your business. The Boston Globe published a set of "why blog" tips.

Here's one (of several) for entrepreneurs:

"5. Blogging makes self-employment easier.

You can't make it on your own unless you're good at selling yourself. One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of marketing yourself is with a blog. When someone searches for your product or service, make sure your blog comes up first.

Curt Rosengren, a career coach, periodically Googles ''career passion" -- words he thinks are most important to his business -- just to make sure his blog comes up high on the list. He
estimates that his blog generates at least half of his coaching business." More here.

Sometime Friday, 4.21.06, a new show, "How to market your business with a blog-1" should be live on the "Talking about Your Great Thing" Podcast. This one shows where and how to set one up. It takes time and interest, not money.

This is the first part of the teleseminar I did with the CEO of Jiggerbug, Ryan Azevedo, about 10 days ago. They're like Netflix, but for for CDs. And they even have my audio books for rent. :)

( Visit Jiggerbug's Network Marketing Page, hosted by Kim Klaver )

Ryan's finishing a little ebook on blogging and how to use it to help market yourself, and it will be available on the house on this blog, as soon as it is.

To be a fly on the wall as two well-known blog pros discuss "Can Bloggers Make Money?" check out their debate in the Wall St Journal 4.19.06

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10 Presentation tips from the Cluetrain

I've been rereading this little book, Cluetrain Manifesto, and the 95 tips it offered 5 years ago to people making sales presentations.

Network marketers: Before you make another presentation to even one more person, check it against this list of imperatives. That is, if you want to make your listeners feel special.

Top-10 Cluetrain Theses: Imperatives for presenters

NOTE: The list of 10 starts about halfway down the page.

P.S. Here are three:

3) "Already, companies [read: people-kk] that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone."

7) "Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be 'picked up' at some tony conference."

8) "The inflated self-important jargon you sling around - in the press, at your conferences - what's that got to do with us?"

Amen.

About The Author:

Kim Klaver is Harvard & Stanford educated. Her 20 years experience in network marketing have resulted in a popular blog, http://KimKlaverBlogs.com, a podcast, http://YourGreatThing.com and a giant resource site, http://BananaMarketing.com and now her new online MLM community http://NetworkMarketingCentral.com.

Having Trouble Maintaining Your Company's Blog?

By Chris McElroy

Most businesses that do some work online have come around to accepting that a company blog can help to get them noticed - both by the search engine spiders and by current and prospective customers. However, despite knowing that a blog can help with their marketing tasks, not everyone knows how to get started.

Those who do get started with blogging also face a number of challenges. Some have trouble deciding between blogging platforms. Some choose to host their blog on a free site rather than on their own server along with their web page. And, those who do end up getting a blog up and running often find that it's hard to stay on top of posting, updating and even knowing what to write about.

The good news is that you don't have to always come up with new topics to write about.

That doesn't mean that you should follow the advice that some websites give - you shouldn't just pull articles from directory sites. Nor should you copy or just rewrite all of the information that's already on your company's website.

What it does mean is that you can consider hiring a content provider who can maintain your company's blog for you.

Imagine working with a company that will install blogging software on your webhost. Picture yourself talking with a search engine optimization professional, someone who can help you to determine which keywords and key phrases will best benefit your site when it comes to search engine rankings and who can establish the appropriate categories for your posts.

Then, once your blog has been set up, think about what it would be like to have a content writer create daily posts for your blog. Each post will be relevant to the products or services that your company provides, and written specifically to a category of your blog. Not only that, but keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site, your products and services and your company will be included in the title, body and closing links of your post.

The writer who creates your blog content will begin a dialog with your current and prospective customers - telling them more about the products and services that you have to offer, more about your company and information that they're looking for. More importantly, the writer who posts to your blog will be able to build links back to your blog, comment on issues that are relevant to your business and your industry and establish your company's reputation.

Whether your business sells tangible goods like DVDs, computers or airline tickets or your company offers bookkeeping services or marketing research, a company blog can help you build customer relationships and credibility. More importantly, it can help to draw traffic to your website.

Everyone knows that original content is king - a blog can add original content to your website on a daily basis. And, when you hire a content producing company like Article Content Provider to maintain your company's blog, you can rest assured that you will have keyword rich, relevant content that your readers can rely on, content that will keep them coming back for more.

Why struggle to come up with the right words when a writer can do it for you? Why invest in search engine optimization techniques that don't always work when you can keep the search engine spiders coming back to crawl your site each and every day?

Let a content provider install blog management software, work with you to choose the right categories and assign a writer who can create quality content for your site - each and every day.

About The Author:

Chris McElroy aka NameCritic manages several blogs for companies and can help you with your blog as a consultant or manager. Visit http://www.seoserviceprovider.com for more info.

RSS In A Nutshell: What It Is And What It Does

By Matthew Hedges

You've probably heard the term "RSS feeds" before, but if you're like most people, it doesn't mean much to you. However, if you sell online, it's high time you discover this powerful marketing tool and what it can do for your E-Biz. According to Jeff Molander(http://www.ThoughtShapers.com), CEO of performance-marketing consulting practice, Molander and Associates, the potential of RSS as a promotional vehicle for online retailers is tremendous.

Really Simple Syndication -
That's what the letters stand for, but RSS is actually just a web feed format, or a means of transporting data across the web. It's often specified in XML (extensible markup language), which is simply the way the data inside a feed is structured. Says Molander, "Think of RSS as an internet plumbing system and XML as a standard way to transmit and receive data through those pipes."

You may already be using RSS feeds and not even realize it. If you get news updates through an information portal like Yahoo, Google, or BlogLines, those updates are powered by RSS behind the scenes. Like your plumbing system, it's in the background doing its job - you aren't supposed to see it.

A Multi-tasking Medium
Currently, RSS feeds are mostly used for syndicated data, like news or sports stats, made available by publishers. But e-marketers are starting to catch on to the possibilities this technology poses:

• With RSS feeds, you can alert your customers whenever you're running a special or adding a new product to your line-up. They can opt-in to receive updates and discussions about the products, in real time, so they're not relying on receiving numerous emails.
• You can attach almost any kind of information to an RSS feed - podcasts, internet radio transmissions, blogs, etc. Some blogging services have made it as effortless as clicking a button to generate a URL that notifies users whenever you publish something new.
• For your customers who prefer to consume their news the old-fashioned way, you can use feed blitzes to turn your feeds into emails. They receive the same instant information access; it's just delivered in a different form.

Straight from the Source
There are a number of companies that can help you publish feeds, and advertise through those channels. Right now, it's possible to monitor how many people are signing up for feeds, but it's hard to obtain any relevant statistics about them.

Here are some great resources for educating yourself about, and utilizing, feeds:

• http://www.SyndicationGumption.com helps you assess and understand RSS audiences.
• http://www.TechCrunch.com gives you the latest news on who's adopting RSS feeds and how they're using them to innovate.
• http://www.MarketingStudies.net provides marketers with tips for capitalizing on RSS, as well as the latest developments surrounding it.

Hitting the Mark - Every Time
You can offer your customers RSS feeds as an alternative to traditional emails. Molander explains, "It's a deliverability issue. We're in a time where distributing desired or valuable information on the web is actually somewhat difficult, specifically for advertisers." Unlike emails, which are often lost, or picked off by spam blockers, RSS brings news directly to your users. It's 100% opt-in, so you know your users are not only getting it, but that they really want it as well. Once they subscribe to your feed, literally nothing stands in the way of your delivering it to them.

About The Author:

Product Sourcing Radio is Created and Hosted by Chris Malta and Robin Cowie of http://WorldwideBrands.com, Home of OneSource: The Internet's Largest Source of Genuine, Factory-Direct Wholesalers for online sellers. Visit http://www.WorldwideBrands.com for more FREE E-Biz & Product Sourcing info!

Earn Passive Income With Blogs

By Chris Chew

Everyone says that one of the easiest ways to earn easy money from home is through the internet. Yes, it is very easy to set up an internet business with little or no money upfront but
questions abound. How do you get visitors to your site and how to get them to buy your products or click on your pay per click ads?

Firstly, let's take a look at how to earn money online. You can earn money online even if you have no product of your own. That means that there will be no inventory and logistic costs too.

One of the ways to earn money online is to create a blog. Creating a blog is free. Then go and apply for Google Adsense and Google will put advertisements on your blog. When visitors at your blog click on your ads, google will pay you a commission and you can actually receive monthly payments from Google.

Now, in order for people to come to your blog and then to click on your advertisements, your blog must be found. The best way for your blog to be found is through the search engines because every day, there are millions if not billions of searches done on the internet. What is more, if your site can be found on the internet, then you are getting visitors and potential customers to your blog for free.

The problem is that there are billions blogs and websites out there and people normally don't look beyond the second page of search engine results. In other words, if your blog do not make
it to the first two pages of any search results, it will probably not be found and your dream of making easy money at home will be dashed unless you cough out money and advertise your site.

However, just think about it. What if your blog can make it to the first two pages of major search engines for many of your keywords? Hey, you will be getting thousands of vistors every day and getting hundreds to thousands of clicks on your ads. What happened then is that you are receiving passive income.

Now imagine what will happen when you duplicate this process again and again? You will have multiple streams of passive income without any capital investment or business risks. Setting up blogs is an easy way to earn money, yes, but getting your blog found need some work. However, once it is done, those blogs can almost be left to auto pilot.

Well, there are hundreds of things search engines take into account when ranking your blog so it will be too simplistic for me to explain it in a short article like this. If you go to the internet and type in "search engine optimization" or "SEO", you will find many articles and books that can teach you how to get top rankings in the search engines.

So you want to find easy ways to earn money? Then learn how to get top search engines ranking for your blog. Other then that, you will probably have to spend some money advertising your blog and the return of investment may not be what you are looking for.

About The Author:

Chris Chew is a blogging entrepreneur. More articles at http://create-attract wealth.blogspot.com and http://universityeducation.blogspot.com

Writing And Blogging For Your Business

By George Meszaros

The key to online marketing is quality content. To get ahead of your competition, you have to be prepared to write well. The ability to write well is an advantage in terms of social media marketing and search engine marketing. In addition to written content, Video and audio are effective online marketing methods.

The best online marketers are experts at getting other spread the word about their products or services. Dedicate yourself to provide remarkable content to empower others to help you get the word out about your business. Take advantage of the inherent viral make up of Internet.

Write Articles

You can significantly increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise. Be sure that your articles are informational. Don't waste anybody's time with commercials disguised as articles. The key to successful article writing is to provide value. People will notice when you have something of value to say.

Articles deemed valuable are; posted on article directories; e-mailed in newsletters, embedded in e-commerce site. In most cases, the author receives a link to his website. The links help in a couple of ways. One, they generate traffic to the site. Second, links help to improve your search engine results. The more links you have pointing to your site the better. Search engines view links to your site as a vote of confidence. The more links you have pointing to your site the more valuable your web site becomes.

You can contact website that might benefit from your articles, and offer your articles. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. Articles offer an effective "viral" approach that can produce hundreds, or even thousands, of links to your site over time.

Practical Example: As you become a prolific author of articles related to your service you build reputation. Through your articles, you enable you customers to find your website indirectly. A business owner may find one of your articles while searching for marketing advice online. After she reads your article, she may click the link to your site from within the byline. Because you have already provided her with value, she is more likely to become a customer.

Start a Business Blog

Your business blog is one of the best ways to get others to link to your site. A blog is less formal than an article and more conversational. You have the power to make your industry interesting to your readers through conversational writing. Theblog is not about you. It is about providing value for your customers. If you offer outstanding content and regular industry comment, people are likely to link to it, increasing your site's link popularity. Remember, links are good.

Practical Example: When you blog you are elevating your status to expert level. People would rather buy from experts than sales people. Provide valuable content to your visitors, and they will spread the word. If you have a blog about fly fishing, your readers are more likely to buy from you than another business that simply lists fly fishing equipment on their site. In addition to becoming customers, they will recommend your business to others, in essence become your unpaid external salesforce.

About The Author:

George Meszaros with http://www.webene.com

Bank Your Blog!

By The Webnet Group

Unless you have just awaken from a 20-year nap, you are aware of blogs... Internet 'web-logs'. Many of us use blogs to record our ideas and experiences, but a few savvy Internet marketers actually use blogs to generate genuine six-figure incomes.

Perhaps you have read the stories about people who have made a fortune from their blog; some of these entrepreneurs have become millionaires many times over because they seem to know
something that we don't. If you are like me, you have made an effort to monetize your blog with AdSense and some affiliate programs and possibly you've had some success. However, earning the 'big bucks' has escaped the vast majority of us bloggers.

Enter Rob Benwell, possibly the world's foremost expert on making money with blogs. Rob has only been on this planet for 22 years, but he has figured out what has stumped us old-timers - how to make his blogs throw off six-figures of revenue. If his name rings a bell with you it is because last year Rob authored a best-selling book entitled, "Blogging To The Bank".

As you know, marketing tactics and promotional methods change hourly on the Internet. It is no surprise that some of the information in Rob's first book (now one year old) is already dated and doesn't have the same significance today as when it was first published.

To address this, Rob has just released a sequel entitled "Blogging To The Bank 2.0", which covers a lot of new information, tips & tricks that can help you make a fortune with your blog.

You'll really like Rob's style, he doesn't consider himself a "guru", or talk down to those of us who are not overly technical. He has a clear concise style that helps you to understand everything he is teaching. Don't think this means this is mundane information because he delivers some real bombshells that will require you to read some topics a number of times to really "get it". When you do . . . you'll realize this fellow is a genius.

Rob covers everything you'll need to know to capitalize on today's changing environment all the while keeping the search engines happy. He covers everything from initial market research to his 5 blogging commandments that if followed, he claims will virtually guarantee success with your blog.

If you have a blog today, or are considering starting a blog, do yourself a favor and read "Blogging To The Bank 2.0". Like most things, there's an easy way to do it - or the hard way, and trust me, when it comes to making money with your blog, you do NOT want to take the hard way.

About The Author:

The author owns The Webunet Group (http://www.webunet.com) an Internet consulting company and DIY Cash Machine where he publishes information and discusses featured products about SEO, SEM, blogging and other online marketing topics. See: http://www.DIYcashMachine.com

Social Bookmarking: Is Social Bookmarking Being Used Against You?

By Greg Haehl

You have probably heard a lot about social bookmarking lately. As a matter of fact, you can spend lots of time and effort today just to find out what Social Bookmarking is all about. Well, not here. I am giving you this information.

I have done the hard part of the research and found this to be a super way to get more traffic to your site. While social bookmarking is a good hobby imagine if you could replace the website option with blogs? There are thousands of blogs out on the web there is no doubt about that and the most popular ones will be very hard to find. The best news is, it's 100% FREE!

To demonstrate the differences between Social Bookmarking sites to normal search engines -let's talk about Google for example as a search engine and how it works compared to Social Bookmarking site such as Furl or Delicious. In any social bookmarking site -your screen will show a range of tags which are in different colors size and intensity which marks the popularity of the tag. These Social Bookmark sites provide a great means of sharing quality content sites -so start bookmarking today!

We all spend more and more time on the Internet - whether we're researching; looking for work; or just browsing for fun. If you are looking for a great blog to read in the morning then you will love the chance to find out the most popular blog via your favorite bookmarking site!Social bookmarks are usually public hence the 'social' and they also allow other users to comment on the links you have saved.

Social bookmarking saves uploading a bunch of urls to your domain or remembering to send them to your Aunt Sally before you visit on the off chance you'll need to remember that special something while you're away. I get a goodly amount of traffic from social bookmarking sites like technorati as well but I would call that site a business bookmarking site so I'm not going to mention it here. Check out
http://www.trafficwebsecrets.com/socialbookmarking/bookmarking_demon.html.

But remember; in the final analysis others will make the decision on whether your way of bookmarking is ethical and useful or spam. A good way to make social bookmarking more useful is to use the notes or comments fields when tagging pages. The simplicity of Social bookmarking websites allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite's list of your browser: Put Social Bookmarking on Autopilot!

About The Author:

Put Social Bookmarking on autopilot at
http://www.trafficwebsecrets.com/socialbookmarking/index.html

Tips On Blogging For Dollars

By Seth Willis Jr.

After you've made the decision to set up and create an ongoing blog for your AdSense revenue, make sure you stay up to date on trends and articles that will drive traffic to your site. It's easy to fall into the trap of reporting and blogging on outdated material, and today's readers need timely and newsworthy information so that they can stay excited and eager to read your work!AdSense advertising will be effective only when it is attached to a worthwhile blog or site. Make sure that when you're blogging for dollars, it's worth your effort and time.

Some key things to remember when you are blogging for dollars include:

Choose the right keywords. Make use of Google's and Yahoo!'s keyword selector tools and get comfortable with the scope and subjects that are popular. Blogging is much easier when you are knowledgeable and confident about a particular subject.

Target your site to a single topic, and branch out. It's easy to start to take in too many different subjects, and this will only confuse your readers. Choose an industry that interests you, and slowly evolve and develop the site to introduce additional and relevant information.

Don't click your own ads! This is a big mistake for your budget, revenue goals, and analysis of how well your site is doing. Spend time promoting your site and driving traffic in other effective ways.

Don't include popup ads on your site. Web visitors find this a nuisance, and they may even leave right away if your popup ad appears more often than not!

Don't pull any ad-clicking tricks. There's no need for hiding an ad, or making sneaky requests when providing information. Keep it clean, direct, and open; your visitors will appreciate it!

Use RSS feeds. This is a great way to encourage people to keep reading your blog, and will help you drive traffic with much less effort.

Promote and submit to multiple sites. Make sure your blog topics and content are available to others; try e-mailing them to people you know, promoting it on discussion boards that are topic-relevant (make sure to stick to the moderator's rules), and send it to the major search engine directories if you can.

Use metatags. These are becoming more popular with the increase of social networking sites that aggregate information online simply by using tags to describe the Website, blog, or piece of information. By making sure you have many metatags included in your blog's description and header, you can increase the chances of exposure.

Use free tools, such as Keyword Digger (http://www.keyworddigger.com/ ) and Google's Traffic Estimator (https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox) to calculate specific keyword costs and popularity.

Analyze your results! It's important to make a process or system to calculate and analyze how well your keywords and specific blog sites are doing. Try doing this on a weekly or even two to three-day basis. Use Google Analytics to help you create your best reports and features that you may need (http://www.google.com/analytics/). The site is particularly tailored for Google advertising campaigns.

About The Author:

Seth Willis Jr. is the webmaster for http://www.adsenseschool.com he is an experienced internet marketer and has a lot of expertise with adsense." I created adsense school so that I could help others who are starting out and needed a resource and tutorial site to get started, the school is completely free and there for anyone with a desire to learn how to make an income using adsense."

What Is Wordpress? - Blogging Made Fun, Fast and Easy

By Hazel Leong

There is absolutely no reason to deny the fact that blogging one of the most popular activities in the world today. Just a decade ago, posting your diary online was considered insane, but now it is clearly becoming the craze among today's overwhelming population of netizens. Not only have people discovered blogging to be a fun way of releasing and expressing oneself to the world, many enterprising individuals have also found it a way to earn some extra income.

With such great offerings from a simple activity, there is no wonder how blogging is rapidly becoming widespread. However, while some people find blabbing about their lives as easy as breathing, the greater majority still finds it quite difficult to create and maintain their blogs. Designing blogs can be a difficult endeavor, especially for the newbies. Luckily, blog making woes can easily be resolved through the help of WordPress. Most people can make their AdSense Blog sites veritable cash cows! Free $97 Secret Adsense Book at http://www.honestreview.info/adsense/index.html

What WordPress Is

WordPress is basically a publishing program that is designed to enhance the jobs of bloggers. It speeds up the blog writing process by providing a wide array of tools that makes the creation of blogs easier than it usually is. WordPress is a very powerful platform for personal publishing. Not only does it make the process of blog designing easy, it also helps one make blog quite appealing and attractive. Is it really worth placing an AdSense banner on your blog? Get your Free $97 Adsense Secret Ebook on Adsense Tips today.

WordPress is software and not a blog hosting service per se. Thus, WordPress can be used on practically any web hosting service, making it very flexible for its many users. Indeed, WordPress does have its own hosting service, which is http://WordPress.com, but many bloggers use the platform with other hosts because it is found to be very reliable, compliant to most existing standards, quick, light, and best of all free.

About The Author:

Most people can make their AdSense Blog sites veritable cash cows! Free $97 Secret Adsense Book at http://www.honestreview.info/adsense/index.html

RSS - Cutting Edge Content

By Scott Lindsay

The use of a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed can ultimately offer business owners the opportunity to feed self updating knowledge-based content to your website visitors.

Agreements can be worked out with applicable third-party websites that allow content to be updated on your website without your intervention.

This third party information can provide industry related news or recent applicable blog entries related to your industry for your site visitors to feast on.

It is possible for a web designer to create a page that draws relevant information from highly specific RSS feeds. This data can be updated and archived as needed.

As a business owner this is good news. It can take some time to receive the permissions needed and then some additional time to recast a website in the image of a multi-source pool of information, but it can be well worth the effort.

Believe it or not, this scenario can also provide the perfect reasoning to work at supplying original content to others through an RSS feed. Other sites may be interested in your original content.

Generally speaking, sites that use this third-party data include the first sentence or paragraph and a link to the full article. This redirects visitors to the site of origin, which if you allow the information to be used elsewhere provides a unique backlink to the originating site.

Many business websites rely on third party (self updating) RSS feeds to supply the most current information to their visitors. These visitors view this information as a comprehensive network that allows them to glean large cross section of knowledge-based content helping them gain a better understanding of the industry you are involved in.

This process allows businesses to see the value in allowing their content to be made available through RSS feed. Obviously most people look at RSS feeds as a means of simply informing subscribers, but the potential with RSS feeds reflects the real power of syndication.

In traditional publishing and broadcasting the idea of syndication has been reserved for those who had the most money and the most skilled writer staff. The Internet removes all barriers by allowing anyone with something to say to syndicate their material through RSS. That doesn't always mean there is an audience for the material, but RSS continues to allow the material to be distributed as widely as interested subscribers make it.

Sure there are risks involved in blindly accepting third party RSS feeds for `publication' on your site. You should either work with only trusted third party content providers or develop a system with your web designer that will allow you to manually approve the content that is ultimately available on your site.

About The Author:

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites at: http://www.highpowersites.com. Start your own ebook business with BooksWealth at: http://www.bookswealth.com

Why Should You Start Blogging?

By Michelle Johnson

Building an acceptable use policy for blogging can be one of the tougher jobs for a company's human resources and internal security divisions to develop. Businesses of all sizes are beginning to realize the advantage of blogging and what that activity can mean for their businesses. If you wish to start blogging, the process is probably easier than you might have thought.

Before you begin with business blogging, you may want to start off experimenting with a personal blog on one of the free blogging sites. Expierenced internet marketers have now accepted blogging as one of the best Internet marketing methods that is free because you could create your blog almost immediately at no cost compared to the setting up of a conventional website. If you are planning on adding blogging to your business as part of your internet
marketing strategy, you must first get some answers to a few questions concerning the impact that blogging can have on your business.

So these few questions address some of the basics of blogging and how it can impact your business. Strategists unfamiliar with blogging should visit blog search sites, like Technorati, Blogger, Wordpress and gauge the impact of the blogosphere. Last I'd like to sum-up what I believe to be the key benefits of using My Yahoo as a blogging productivity tool : It bundles several tools in one : mail reader, RSS news reader & aggregator, agenda, sticky notes, search engine, online bookmarking and browsing Yahoo directories.

Overall, there are many ways that you could make money on the internet, but many of them will take more time, energy and money than the average person has to spend on them. Not only does your average Blogging software enable Push Button Content Updates, BUT it also has the ability to do a MULTITUDE of the Mundane tasks we have to undertake to build our traffic to our websites.

Basically a blog is a website where a blogger enters "posts" in reverse chronological order (meaning that the newest "posts" are displayed first ) using some sort of blogging software that allows readers to comment on posts, effectively adding new content to the blog. You have someone in your organization who will assume responsibility for the blog, who is both willing and able to sustain the blog with regular posts. When you create your Blog, let us say about "working from home", and its posts use the galleries and Urls from your sponsors.

When you sign up for a Blog or create one on your own site use part of the name or a similar name to the name of the sponsor program you are promoting unless it is against the sponsors T. Quite Simply, a Blog, is a Software to Power your websites, how you decide to use it is up to you, but one thing I will tell you is that the whole Idea behind the fact that blogs are easy to use is to use them Well, and update them regularly, to see the full benefit. I'm not going to lie it is a lot of hard work maintaining the flow of content to your Blogs but who said Life (or Blogging ) was going to be an easy ride?

Start blogging today. It's fun and it's easy.

About the Author:

Michelle Johnson - Helping you find the best work at home or business opportunity. For more articles and reviews visit her blog at http://fullofinfo.blogspot.com

Increase Your Business With A Blog

By Liz Tomey Bing

When running your own business, a blog can really help to make your website successful. It can give readers information about your product and can also actually be the thing that brings new visitors to your site. It is a business tool that can help you update your site with informative content to keep readers coming back for more.

There are two main reasons that you should include content on your website. Content can help visitors develop trust in your product and your knowledge. Also, it will help to increase your site's appearance in internet search engine ranks.

First of all, having content that is relevant can help to increase the credibility of your business. It can do so by providing important information to your clients and potential clients. If your blog is full of interesting and relevant information, people naturally assume that your company is interesting and relevant to them. This improves your chance of adding these readers as future customers. Once they realize that you are providing an informative service to them, they will gain trust in your and your product, thus producing sales in the future.

Secondly, the only way to increase your site's chances of being ranked high with search engines is to include that good content. With optimized content you are able to keep your site in the top picks. Search engines will locate and rank your site based on the content provided there. If they determine that the content is good, unique, and relevant to people, your ratings will improve. Higher rankings mean potential customers can more easily search and find your company, and that, in turn, means higher profit for you!

So, you have decided that you are ready to try blogs. You are confident that you can write good, relevant articles to promote your business and product. However, you just are not sure how to get started? You need to figure out how to publish your articles and make sure search engines are aware of the content available on your site. To do this, you should employ the use of blogging software, blog directories, and article directories. Let's consider your choice of blogging software.

Blogging software can help you to manage the articles that you write. Most will provide features such as word processing, database storage, archiving, search options, and RSS newsfeed. Each of these, along with others offered, can help make using a blog more effective and time efficient for you.

In many cases, you can order customizable blog software. This means you can choose which features to use, adding or deleting various features at any time. For example, some bloggers choose to turn off the comments feature to discourage spammers from leaving unrelated comments just to leave their own link.

You can choose between two main types of blogging software. You can choose hosted or integrated, depending on your needs. Both can help you manage articles, and there are even some free options available.

Hosted blog versions are those such as Wordpress and Blogger. They are websites that host individuals' blogs for free. Any articles published on a company's blog are actually held or stored on the website that is provided by the software company. You will not use your own website as the address of your blog but instead will use the company's website with an extension that is personal to you. This option is good for those with limited funds, but it also can be less beneficial to your website since your content is not available on your site itself.

An integrated version of blogging software means that articles and software used to manage them are all set up live on your own website. Your site will increase due to the blog being hosted there and the new visitors that are attracted by that content. It also helps to increase your site's rankings with search engines and helps to make your business seem professional and credible.

When setting up a blog to use in your marketing plans, consider your options carefully. There are number of ways you can go with blogs, but be sure to use the one that is right for you. Consider your needs and take some time to research your options before making a final selection.

About The Author:

Liz Tomey runs

6 Blogging Myths That Are Holding You Back

By Rich Brooks

By the hammer of Thor there's a lot of blogging myths out there; myths that keep you from generating more online leads and building lasting relationships with clients.

The problem with these myths is that if they're not challenged they turn into conventional wisdom. If you've been looking to drive more traffic to your Web site and improve communications with customers, you owe it to yourself to give a business blog a try.

Below are some of the hurdles--exaggerated or imagined--I've heard business owners use to avoid starting a blog, and real-world experience to debunk these myths.

1) My customers don't read blogs. I hear this all too often by business owners who don't completely understand what a blog is. Now, perhaps your customers don't subscribe to any blogs, or they don't return daily to a favorite blog. However, if they use Google or Yahoo for search, chances are they stumbled upon a search result from a blog. Since blogs often rank high at the search engines, if your customers use the Internet, you can capture their attention with a blog.

2) Blogging is for teenagers to share the minutiae of their lives and what they think of the remaining American Idol contestants. While teens certainly took to blogging quicker than businesses, these days companies of all sizes and shapes have realized the benefits of a business blog. You wouldn't dismiss the telephone as a communication device just because your teenager spends hours each night on it, would you?

3) Blogging is just a fad/This too will pass. Didn't you say the same thing about the Internet back in 1997? Of course no one can predict the future and much of the hype about blogs is just that. However, it's important to realize that blogs are a powerful, easy-to-use communication tool, and communicating with customers and prospects will never go out of style.

Besides, blogs are an effective marketing tool today, so don't worry if in five years you've moved on to your next communication medium. If you've cultivated an active audience, they'll follow you to other distribution channels.

4) Blogging takes up too much time. I run a growing business, sit on the board of MEBSR (Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility), participate in a business-owners group, do a lot of writing and speaking, and carry my share in raising our two daughters. Trust me, I know from being busy.

However, in the past two-and-a-half years of blogging, I've discovered that it's probably the most effective use of my marketing time. Blogging helps establish your expertise, generates loads of search engine leads, and delivers your message through three distribution channels each time you write. (Read more on the three faces of blogs.)

As business owners we have limited time in the day to market our services; blogging provides great return on that investment.

5) Blogging is fraught with dangers, like people leaving negative comments. These days, consumers can vent their frustration with your product or service anywhere on the Web, whether it's a post at their own blog, a review at Epinions.com, or a scathing YouTube video. If I had my choice, I'd rather have that conversation happen where I have home court advantage. How you handle negative feedback can establish your authenticity, and help you win over new converts.

And, if you happen to find yourself with a PR nightmare, you don't have to worry about letting the media tell your side of the story. By using your own blog you have unfettered access to anyone with a connection to the Internet.

People are looking for transparency and authenticity from companies these days, and your blog is the perfect tool to match these needs.

6) My customers don't read blogs. Whoa. Feelings of deja vu. Didn't we respond to this earlier? Oh, you mean that you don't get leads from the Internet? That they only use the Yellow
Pages or go on advice from a friend? Well, then your audience is shrinking. The average consumer is much more likely to use the Web to search for a product or service, or at least visit
your Web site to learn more about your company.

If you haven't gone after this audience before, you're missing an opportunity of getting in front of a younger audience...your customers and clients of tomorrow.

And trust me, they read blogs.

The truth about blogging is that it's proven an effective marketing tool for a wide range of businesses. You can start a blog on your own through a service like TypePad or by
installing a blogging platform like WordPress on your own server. Alternatively, you can hire a Web design firm to design, develop and promote your blog and get you up to speed quickly.

Whatever path is right for you, don't let these myths keep you from giving business blogging a chance.

About The Author:

Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web design and Internet marketing company
(http://www.flyte.biz/). Download his free article, "The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make." at http://www.flyte.biz/special/free-report/

Using Blogs For Internet Marketing

By David Bain

Blogging can be an effective internet marketing method. However, your blog posts must be relevant and must lead people wanting more of your insight, thereby leading them to click on your link so they can visit your site.

Internet entrepreneurs must realize the unlimited potential and profit of marketing through blogging. However, it is not enough to start blogging. You must know exactly what topics and what content to post on your blog posts so you will get people hooked on you, your blog posts and, eventually, your web site or page. Here are some blogging suggestions which can turn blogging turn into a very effective internet marketing tool for your online business or for your website.

1. Post Albums

Nothing can be more interesting than looking at pictures. Pictures tell stories and provide more precise descriptions than mere words can. Be sure to upload several pictures of the products offered by the company (as long as it's relevant to the blog post).

2. Share Real Experiences that People Could Relate to

People find stories more appealing than any bookish content. If you are selling a particular product, relate funny stories about some of your customers (do not name names, of course). Be sure to highlight your products in your stories. The story could also be about problems you've had. In this case, be sure to subtly emphasize your capabilities and expertise.

There should be something unique with the stories and the words used have to be in narrative form so reader could try and recreate the story in their imaginations.

3. Provide Up to Date Information

See if there is any upcoming news or details that might impact your industry. If you are always giving interesting and updated news through your blog posts, then people would be looking forward to your posts. New product lines could be advertised on the blog to introduce the item to the general public. Be sure to give a background on it as well as provide a story on how it was created. People will be interested to know why a new innovation has been added and how it came about.

By posting updates and new information, you will gain stature and credibility in your industry. When your readers find a need for services or products that you offer, they're likely to visit
your site and obtain this service or product from you. Moreover, if your readers know people who need your type of services or products, they're likely to recommend your site, too. Your readers may even actually repost your blog posting in their own blogs or in forums where they are members.

4. Relate How the Product Was Used by Another

In some cases, one will have to refer to another online article which entails asking for approval prior to posting them on the blog. Once the go signal is lit, a link can be added to show how another individual have found use for the product. Potential clients will be curious how it worked for an existing client.

5. Anecdote to Go With the Product

Most individuals are interested with quotable quotes and anecdotes. Your post can be a funny statement you heard from a customer or a child who used your product or service. It is similar to creating a tag line that could distinguish a product from the others.

About The Author:

David Bain is founder of the internet marketing training company
http://www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com. David has recently interviewed one of the leading blogging experts, Yaro Starak. To hear the interview visit http://www.freeiq.com/yarostarakinterview.

How To Write Headlines That Electrify And Tantalize Customers

Peter Geisheker

Did you notice the title for this article? Of course you did and that is why you clicked to read this article. As legendary advertising guru David Ogilvy said in his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, "The wickedest of all sins is to run an advertisement without a headline."

Yes, it is true that the most important tool in print advertising is the headline, be it for a space advertisement, a website, a sales letter, a billboard, or a press release. Headlines are the difference between success and failure in advertising.

In print advertising, the headline is so important that it is considered to be 80% of the power of an ad. The reason for this is that five times as many people read a headline as read the body copy of an ad. Consider how you read a newspaper or a magazine. If you are like most people, you scan headlines and you only read the news stories and advertisements that have a headline that catches your attention and interest. That is why writing an attention grabbing headline is so vitally important in advertising.

So, how do you write a good headline? Actually, it is not as hard as you think. In fact, decades of research has been done on advertisements to see which headlines generate the most leads and sales and here is a summary of what works.

1. Your headline should flag down readers who have a specific problem. For example, if you are selling cosmetics that help middle age women look younger, your headline should state that benefit. For example, "How women over 40 can look 10 years younger in 10 minutes with XYZ Cosmetics."

2. There are two words that work like magic in headlines - "How to." People are drawn to headlines that say "How To" like bees to honey. Why? People are curious and want to learn "how to" solve a problem. Therefore, always try to start your headline with the words "How to".

3. If possible, use the words "FREE" and/or "New" in your headline. Both words are magnets that draw in readers to read your advertisement.

4. Make your headline sound like news. A great way to learn how to do this is to buy a newspaper and read the headlines, particularly the headlines on the cover page. People want news, so make your headline sounds like a news headline from a newspaper and people will want to read your ad. Words that suggest news are "New", "Announcing", and "A Major Breakthrough".

5. Longer headlines sell more merchandise than short headlines. Try to make your headlines 6 12 words in length.

In summary, the headline is the most powerful tool in advertising. If you want to create successful advertising, become a master at writing attention grabbing headlines.

About The Author:

Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm. Peter develops and implements strategic marketing programs for small businesses. For more information please visit http://www.geisheker.com.

How To Create A Blog That Pays The Bills

By Yvonne Lambert-Smith

The statistic is really staggering. Only one percent of those who start a bog succeed to monetize the site. However, the good news is those who did succeed as loggers are able to earn enough money to live comfortable while working in the comforts of their home. In fact, there are a number of loggers out there that are earning a good five digit income a year. The truth is that blogging can be a very lucrative online home business if and only if you have the talent and the right attitude towards your business.

What makes some fail while others succeed? Successful bloggers invested a lot of time, efforts and talents into their site. They believe that writing a blog is not just a hobby that they can do during their spare time but rather something that should be taken seriously. In other words, blogging is not just about writing something, it about writing something interesting for the readers. To become successful, bloggers must anticipate what his or her readers want to read. They must know how to hold the interest of their readers. Once a blogger gets the attention of his or her readers, there is a big chance that these readers will keep coming back to read more of what the blogger has to say. As the traffic to the site increases, there is now a high potential to earn money through the site.

Monetizing your blog

Some writers feel rather strongly about putting ads on their blog. These writers believe that having all those icons, banners and logos all over their site is taboo. Sure, nobody really wants to put so many ads on their site but the thing is advertisements bring in the money. If your site has huge traffic and you want to monetize your blog, you must be prepared to set aside some space for your advertisers. You must design your site in such a way that it will be easy for advertisers to put up their logo. A word of caution though, you must not put too many advertisements in your site otherwise your site will become too crowded and difficult to navigate. Most readers would shy away from blogs that are difficult to navigate and if you lose your readers, you will lose your income. Most online advertisers pay the site owners according to the number of views or clicks made on their ads. If the traffic to your site decreases, naturally, your income will be affected.

Another way of earning money through your blog is through affiliate programs. Choose an affiliate program that is relevant to the contents of your blog. For instance, if your blog is all about children and parenting, it would be wise to join affiliate programs that are selling products for children.

Copyright © Yvonne Lambert-Smith

About The Author:

To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.Enterprise-internet.com

Internet Authors aren't Newspaper Columnists

By Mike Scantlebury

The problem with the internet is that it changes so fast, and develops in so many different ways, that ordinary people have problems keeping up with it. Worse, they don't see new things as they are but instead, as reflections of things they are already familiar with. It's as though somebody caught sight of a zebra for the first time and said, 'Oh look, a horse with black and white stripes'. Well, yes, that's almost true, but a zebra isn't a horse. It's a unique species. And what is developing on the web isn't old ideas with new stripes, either. They are new species too.

I heard a man on Radio 4 this morning and he was complaining that bloggers aren't as good as old-fashioned newspaper columnists. His argument rested around the fact that they weren't being paid! The underlying assumption he had - that he was revealing - was that if people who wrote blogs were any good as writers, then they would be able to get jobs on newspapers. Since they aren't - employed on newspapers - they must be inferior writers and shouldn't be read!

To me, this is an example of mixing up genres and failing to see how the internet has changed things. Sure, some bloggers aren't good writers and some blogs are boring and even incoherent. But some bloggers, on the other hand, are excellent writers and would be welcome in the offices of any publication, (if they chose to try their hand at the world of journalism). Any regular internet reader knows this. I don't have to argue the case. It's only the regular newspaper readers, the people who drop in on the internet occassionally, dip in and out, cruise around and don't really get a feel for it, who might believe that the bad blogs they find are typical. They aren't.

There's also the assumption that if people aren't paid, it's because they're no good at what they do. It's not like that. Most people write blogs because they have something to say, not because they have adopted the professional position of 'journalist' or 'commentator' or 'columnist'. Only later, if they really are good at it, (and people notice and come to their site regularly), then they might decide to throw in a few Adsense ads or incorporate some other money-making venture at their address. But - the man on Radio 4 poured scorn on these attempts. He quoted the case of a blogger who, he asserted, was '50th in the world' in terms of popularity. The man had only made $3,500 last year from his blog, (stated our radio pundit), Somehow, to him, this proved the man wasn't a good writer. Nonsense. It 'proves' he isn't a well-paid newspaper columnist, drawing a fee to produce a regular weekly column, but it says nothing about the standard of writing - merely that the rewards for writing articles on the internet are on a different level from out there in the 'traditional' writing world.

The problem really, it seems to me, is that the new world of interent authoring has created new ways of 'being a writer'. Our commentator above probably longs for the days when he could attend polite dinner parties and people could discuss newspaper columns they'd read, from writers they admired. The great thing then, of course, was that if someone said, 'Did you see what so-and-so said in The Observer this week', then there was a good chance that everyone might have seen it. (But not everyone sees the same articles on the web, they're too widespread.) Even better, if you hadn't seen the article in question, you could still go home and dig out your copy, or borrow one from a friend, or even - heaven knows, new technology - go to the internet and download a copy from the newspaper's website. There would then be a feeling of shared culture, everyone reading the same things, giving their opionions on the same pieces they had read. It was comfortable.

But, just as changes in TV broadcasting have produced hundreds of channels and a huge divergence in viewing patterns, so the web has given great new opportunities for more writers to get online, more views to be expressed, and more debate to happen. It's just different. It needs new skills. For instance, you are in the process of reading this article in front of you. It might have cropped up on any number of web sites. You might have found it anywhere. But, if you want to find what else I've written, it's simple: you put the name 'Mike Scantlebury' into a search engine and track down other articles by me. You might then decide to print them out and save them in a folder.

People used to do that. The only difference then was that their 'favourite' columnist would have been found in the same place, at the same time. Say, a column in their favourite Sunday newspaper. Now, it's different. Now you may have to hunt around to find other stuff by the same author. But if you liked what the person said, you could still decide to save the clippings. Hey, what have you got? A folder full of bits of paper, (just like the example above). That hasn't changed.

What has changed is that there are more opinions getting an airing, more voices being heard. That's threatening for people who want to feel comfortable with a 'spokesperson' they feel comfortable with. The plethora of opportunities to be seen is confusing for anyone who likes to have a habit. So, if you are used to buying your regular Sunday newspaper because you like its style, its stance, its take on the news, how upsetting would it be to go in the shop one day and find that there were suddenly a thousand papers on sale, instead of the choice of six or eight that you were used to seeing? It would be very disturbing.

The answer, to our friend on the radio, is that he has decided to close his eyes to this new choice, and try to limit it somehow. Mainly by deriding the new writers, and attacking the range of choice offered by the internet. No need. That will happen anyway. Why do you think his example was the '50th most popular' blog on the web? Because people don't read everything that's out there, regularly. People make choices, anyway. Readers liked what the '50th' person had to say and kept coming back. That made the blog popular. Even better, suppose the writer then becomes famous, who knows, some newspaper might come along one day and offer them a position (or even, perhaps, syndicate their output in the paper). That would be great for our man on the radio. He would then be able to read the newspaper and discuss the articles inside with his friends at dinner parties, just as he has always done. In fact, he would be looking at an animal with black and white stripes, but no worries. He could still pretend it was a horse.

About the Author:

Mike Scantlebury is an Internet Author, selling his varied books at Lulu and making downloads available at his home site. He has also founded a Discussion Forum about the future inevitable triumph of internet publishing at http://www.publishingisdead.com where all contributions to the debate will be warmly welcomed.

Simple RSS Tricks

By John Jantsch

By now you've heard of the whole RSS thing and maybe you've even started using it in various ways to subscribe to blogs or offer your blog's content to others. Today I would like to take you on a little ride to show you how, without really knowing much of anything about RSS and how it works, you can do some very powerful and useful things to add, filter and republish content.

Tracking mentions of a certain product

Search technorati.com and other blog search engines for mentions

Tag each mention with del.icio.us book mark using a tag like DTMbook

Grab the feed that del.icio.us automatically produces.

Just for fun, take feed to Feedburner and burn the feed

Set-up and republish the feed using Feedburner's Buzz Boost Option

Take code to any web and display dynamic real-time update (some CSS styling can help here)

Sit back and look cool - see the feed displayed in the right sidebar here

You can also do this via email alerts by setting Google or Yahoo News alerts for specific search terms.

If you've ever wanted to easily publish a schedule of upcoming event, deadlines or even birthdays as a dynamic list rather than a calendar style page here's an RSS trick for you to use.(This can be done on a public or private page)

Create a free Google Calendar account and slug in all the dates on the calendar (Any shareable calendar will do)

Google automatically creates an RSS feed for your calendar - take this URL and create free Feedburner account

Optimize the feed using the Event Feed option from Feedburner

Publish the feed using Feedburner's BuzzBoost option - lots of options for display

Paste the code Feedburner produces for you on the page you would like your list to show

Using this formula produces a dynamically changing list of events that will run from first up to last, automatically drop events that have passed, and automatically bring in future events per your settings. Now, anyone with access to a web browser and your Google Calendar account can update and edit your events list.

I use this for my upcoming speaking events. Bonus - you can easily set this up so others can subscribe to this events list too.

Delivering Personalized Information via RSS

Just when you thought you were getting the hang of using RSS as a research tool, someone comes along and tells you that it's not enough.

Now it's become ultra easy to use RSS technology to create individual feeds of information and supply them to your best clients. You know they want to figure this RSS thing out but just can't seem to get around to it. So, do it for them.

Here's what I would suggest. Go to www.mysyndicaat.com and create personalized, search specific, RSS feeds, mash them together and deliver customized information to your clients on a daily basis. The current trendy name for this is a newsradar

Syndicaat allows you to easily mash multiple feeds together creating one very focused and personalized feed. (Yahoo Pipes does this as well, but my results with it have been spotty)

So, let's say you have a client that produces tents for active outdoor types. You can search very specific terms and phrases in Google News, Yahoo News, Bloglines, Technorati, Google Blogs, Outdoor Forums, and anything else that produces an RSS feed and mash all the content about your client, their competitors, the industry, specific keywords and phrases, you name in, into one digestible, personalized newsfeed that changes daily. (Don't tell your client how easy this is, just do it and bill them for it - they'll thank you.)

Talk about a great way to get a competitive edge. It's like creating personalized publications for each client or each marketing segment you serve. What if you did this for your prospects as a way to show them what you could do? You can make all this content public or create private password protected feeds. You can also republish the RSS feed and data on any web page on your site using simple javascript or even Feedburner's Buzz Boost and then put it in your client's private page on your website. So now they come to your website for their industry news everyday - you got to like the sound of that.

About the Author:

John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com .

How to Make Money with Your Blog - Where to Start

By Carol Stack

How do you make money with a blog? There are several ways, including Adsense, affiliate programs, and selling space on your blog.

Adsense

For the blogger who doesn't have their own product, it's still possible to earn money from their blog thanks to Google Adsense. Google Adsense is free to join and easy to set up.

As you write the content for your blog, keep in mind that the ads shown are dependant upon the surrounding content on your web pages. Also, experiment with the placement of the ads to discover where the ads sit that get the most clicks.

Many believe that the best places for the ads are at the top left, at the bottom of the first post on the page and in the footer. Unless your blog is strictly an Adsense site, it's recommended not to make it look too cluttered with Adsense ads.

Unless you are in a niche that provides you with high costs per click, you can expect to make anywhere from ten cents a click to one dollar. There are niches that pay several dollars.

The more traffic your site gets, the more clicks, which will result in more income for you. There are sites that earn a few cents a day and there are sites that earn thousands a month. It all depends on the niche and the traffic.

Products

Another avenue for making money with your blog is to create and sell a product. Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula walks you through each step involved for creating a product, preparing to sell it, and launching it to the public. Anyone who wants to sell their own products online would be wise to invest in Jeff's product.

Selling a product, whether it is an ebook you acquired with resell rights or a product you made yourself, is usually a better way of making significant income. Done correctly, including researching what the public wants, you can usually make a better income selling your own product than depending on Adsense. There are always the exceptions.

Affiliate

Another way to make money with your blog is to promote affiliate programs. When researching the topic for your blog investigate what affiliate programs are available.

Check out Commission Junction, Clickbank, and online stores that sell products your target audience is interested in. For instance, if you have a pet site then possible affiliate programs would include Petsmart and PetCo.

Referrals

Perhaps you are in a niche that would attract viewers who need a loan, a credit card, or debt relief. There are many companies that will pay you, the blog owner, a significant amount to refer people to their site to simply fill out a form. For each person you refer who fills out a form, you get paid as much as $45, or even more.

Text Ads

This new type of advertising is still growing and evolving and the majority of ads being served are not graphical but text-based in nature. As a publisher, you can earn cash by selling ads on your blog yourself, or you can use a third party ad service and run their ads on your site. Once you've setup an account and placed the ads on your site, just sit back and watch the cash come in.

How Long for any Income

It's not going to happen overnight, but it shouldn't be long, maybe two or three months, before your blog is bringing in an income that covers your blogging expenses. A little longer, and each blog should make enough to pay some of your living expenses.

Depending on how diligently you pursue blogging as an income source, you could be making a significant amount of money within a year or two, especially if you create your own product.

About the Author:

Grab lots of free reports and information at http://www.selfpublishinghelper.com on starting your own online publishing busines using blogs, video, audio and more . Carol Stack freely shares her knowledge and insights that she has gained over the years. Visit her site to discover how you too can make money at home.

Blog So People Will Read It!

By Liz Tomey Bing

You are excited! Your blog has been created and you have started to post. The only problem is, no one is reading it. How can you find an audience to actually read what you have written?Consider using the tips below to help increase your readership.

1. Be sure to use good quality content. What is written in your blog should be interesting enough to keep people's attention and should be timely. It is important to update your blog regularly. You can also use keywords in your content to help you blog to be picked up by search engines.

2. Become a part of communities that are relevant to blogging. Talk to other bloggers about what has worked for them, and do not be afraid to take their advice.

3. Take the time to publish an RSS/Atom/XML feed. You can do this very easily on a blog hosting site such as Blogger.

4. Take care in choosing the titles of your subjects and articles. Think about what potential readers will be searching for, and incorporate keywords into your titles. You can also subscribe to a search reporter such as Word Tracker. These groups publish the most popular searches each week and can help you decide what topics you would like to include in your blog.

5. Participate in other people's blogs. Comment on them and offer feedback. Most comment features offer you the opportunity to post a link back to your blog, and you may interest that blog's owner or a reader of that blog who may be interested in what you have to say.

6. Set up your email and forum signatures to include the address of your blog. This is easy advertising that you take the time to set up once. You never know when a potential reader may click on your link and become fascinated with what you have to say!

7. Research the internet and find blog directories. List your blog there to attract potential readers.

8. Write articles and submit them to online article directories. These can be easily found in a basic web search. Most directories allow you to place an author's byline at the end of the article. You can include a link to your blog in that byline.

9. Use an update service or ping service to let readers know your blog has been updated. This can serve as a gentle reminder readers that you are out there with something to say!

10. Create a blogroll or link list of blogs that you enjoy reading. As with commenting on other's blogs, this can introduce your blog to other bloggers as well. This opens the door for your blog being linked by another blogger and their readership being introduced to you as well. However, do not create a huge blogroll just for the sake of trying to get links on others' pages. This can be annoying for your readers.

The most important thing to remember is that a solid readership does not evolve overnight. It takes time to get to know people and their interests before your blog can become successful. Spend time reading other blogs, making comments, and getting to know those writers. Have fun with it, and allow your blog to grow naturally on its own.

Blogs can be wonderful marketing tools, and they can also be wonderful for social networking and creating friendships. With a little effort and some time, you can develop a readership full of loyal, interested friends.

About The Author:

Liz Tomey runs http://www.BigWebBlogs.com where you can submit your blog for incredible exposure at no cost! Check out our latest blogs on blog web hosting today!

The Blogger's Guide To Online Income

By Tobias Smith

The world of blogging, or keeping an online journal, has made a huge jump in popularity over the last few years. People keep blogs for all sorts of reasons, and some of them have figured out that it can actually be an online internet business opportunity.

What is this `Blog as an Online Internet Business Opportunity' idea that has many people excited, and how does it work? Well, first of all, it is important to note that in order to make blogging an online internet business opportunity, one must actually have, and consistently write in a blog. If you are unsure about the world of blogging, it would be a smart move to explore your different options before you try to use blogging as a new online internet business opportunity. Read the blogs of others and set up a blog account yourself. There are multiple sites on the internet that allow you to set up your own personal blog, and the blog does not necessarily need to be an online internet business opportunity.

There are a few different advertisement companies on the internet that will allow you to sign up to put their advertisements on your blog. This does not generate a huge amount of income, but can be a good online internet business opportunity. The more people you drive to your site, the better online internet business opportunity your blog will be. The advertisements will be geared toward the interests of your specific audience, and each time the ad is clicked, this online internet business opportunity will be generating income for you.

If you develop a large following of readers who adore your blog, there is another way to turn your blog into an online internet business opportunity. Many times, especially with humorous blogs, you can even market the idea of yourself, and this is another online internet business opportunity. T-shirts, mouse pads, music CD's, and other toys and trinkets can be sold with your face or unique logo, and if you are popular, adoring fans will easily provide income to you through this online internet business opportunity. This is another aspect of blogging that can be a lot of fun. It is worth mentioning, however, that you may want to consider the potential ramifications of using your own personal likeness or name in the public as an online internet business opportunity.

It is important to note that while blogging for pay can be a good online internet business opportunity, it is not usually considered a very high-income business. Anyone who tries to tell you that blogging will make you high amounts of cash probably does not understand what type of online internet business opportunity it is. However, blogging for pay can be an excellent way to make a little extra on the side, and besides being an online internet business opportunity, it can also be quite enjoyable for writers. If you are interested in writing, as well as finding an online internet business opportunity, blogging for pay may be an excellent option for you.

About The Author:

Learn how to start your own home business online earning multiple streams of income at
http://www.MakingCashOnlineNow.com

3 Dead Easy Ways To Get More Subscribers And Build Your Opt-In List

By Jo Han Mok

It is obvious in the Internet world that people have to go to websites to find and get what they want. However the decision to buy the product can be quite hard for the customer to decide. This battle going on in the mind of your customer needs credibility and persuasion in order for your customer to set the decision you want them to make.

It has been said and proven that the email marketing strategy is the one of the strategies you should not miss out when you're doing any system of Internet marketing. This is because first visit sales rarely make the cut. Customers have to be persuaded, reminded and told to visit our sites again to make them confirm and get the product. To properly administer email marketing, you first need an autoresponder like Aweber or GetResponse. The autoresponder is a software that can make automatic and sequential emails to your subscribers. What you should do next is to create an opt-in page for people to subscribe to you on your site.

The three easy opt-in strategies you can use to get people to subscribe to your opt-in list are:

1.Provide Them With A Bonus

Give your potential subscribers something to look forward to when they subscribe to your list. People get excited when they receive something they could get for free. You can provide for them a free bonus product that is of value when they subscribe to you. It can be a digital product such as an ebook or a physical sample of a product that you're selling.

2.The Subscription Box

The Subscription box is a large square or rectangle formed by bold and dotted lines. The opt-in form where people impart their name and email address is placed into that box. The main purpose of the Johnson box is to get the attention of the visitor to psychologically move their eyes to the Johnson box, read the benefits of being your subscriber and subscribe to your list.

3.Write a Good Opt-In 'Copy'

Other than providng your customers with a bonus, another better way of making them happy is to promote the bonus with powerful copywriting and persuasion techniques. For example, "Just Enter Your Name And Email Address To Claim Your Personal Development E-Book Worth $27, Absolutely FREE!" Make sure every word of that sentence is capitalized, and emphasize on the bonus and the opt-in list.

These three extremely easy ways of getting subscribers can be applied to websites and blogs. Simply automate your emails to your list and keep reminding them of what you're selling on your website and always have a URL link that links to your website. You can search for email templates online that can guide you on how to effectively let your customers take action and purchase your products from your site.

About the Author:

Jo Han Mok is the author of the #1 international business bestseller, The E-Code. Unlock the code for unlimited online profits for yourself by visiting his website today at: http://www.SuperFastProfit.com

Affiliate Marketing With Blogs: The Golden Goose?

By Kenneth Zhou

Want to make more money online in an affiliate marketing programme? Here's some advice from a very smart -- and very successful -- guy who does just that:

"I blog at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and I make about $2,000 USD a month via affiliate products. Here's my advice if you choose to use a blog as part of your affiliate marketing arsenal."

TIPS FROM AN AFFILIATE MARKETING EXPERT:

- Blog honestly and consistently. When you blog every day and make the content your own words, and helpful, you build up a very powerful relationship between you and your readers. At a certain point your blog gains the credibility of the recommendation of a friend. After that, sales are a piece of cake.

- Don't hesitate to write over and over about the same product in your affiliate marketing programme. You can come at it from different points of view that way... write about what you
expect from the product at first, why you bought it, how you hope to use it, and so on. Then you can tell your cyber-friends out there, (the ones whose trust you've gained through your blog), exactly how the product came through for you. You're basically echoing what any purchaser goes through with any product, not regurgitating a lot of recognizable affiliate marketing jargon. Product reviews are highly sought-after and help make sales for you.

- Make sure everything you blog has content the reader can really use, and are not just sales puff pieces.

- For your affiliate marketing plan, you can attract links with blogs much easier than with normal websites, so do remember your slogan: Blog Every Day!

- As you build up content, it will compound the effect of each single blog, and each article will have a synergistic effect on the whole process.

- Save time every day to work on building a list. Once you have a credible, substantial blog and a list to match, you're in the affiliate marketing business!

About The Author:

Please Visite our website at http://www.make2ndincome.com for information. Our website is dedicated to researching Internet home business ideas and opportunities that can help you start a new Internet home business or grow the one you already have.

Removing Bloggers Block

By Chris Taylor

Some of you may have already experienced writer's, or in this case blogger's, block. This is when you can't seem to start blogging anything worthwhile, sometimes not even a single word's worth.

How could this happen when you were so good at blogging before? Why is it that you can't get one word written? And the most frustrating thing of all: the more time you spend thinking about blogging, the less able you are to start your next project! Is there any cure? Luckily, there are a few things you can try.

Visiting other people's blogs is a good start. Read through your favorite ones, or do a random blog search and see what gets turned up. Reading what other people have to say can spark
your own creativity and send you over the hump of blogger's block. Leave some comments to get you started; you might be able to expand on their ideas, and sometimes you can track back
to your own blog. Looking at your blog inbox can help, too, as there might be a question or comment there that can get you started.

Look for a word or topic. Then begin writing about it. You can also do this with pictures. Check out photos and think of something to write about it. You can also check the news, which is always rich with current events. Even if there isn't anything that directly relates to what you normally write about, writing about something completely different than your normal topics can help.

If those things do not seem to work for you, you can search for creative or journal writing software to help you with your writing problem. Oftentimes, these things have suggestions of topic or idea that can help you get started.

Think about an extraordinary topic. For example, you can research about inventions and inventors. What was the first car ever invented? Anything that you fancy can become a blog entry. You can look for answers to questions like the one about the car at online resources like encyclopedias and almanacs. When you have the answer, blog about it. You never know, maybe some people are thinking of the same things and you have answered their questions. Besides, it can be good to drift from your usual topic one in awhile. Your readers might feel refreshed by the change.

If none of these exercises help, it might be time to do something unrelated to writing for a while. Sometimes we just need a break from writing! Go outside, go shopping, go to a movie. Anything to take your mind off of your blog. You just might feel refreshed and ready to start blogging once you get back up in front of your computer.

There are a lot more ways to beat blogger's block. If you come up with something new that helps you get over it, think of what a good blog topic your experience would be! Who knows, you may even help someone out there who is struggling with blogger's block!

About The Author:

Visit http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com

today! Your comprehensive guide to rss and blogs including our
http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/rss-feed-submission-sites-service.html.

Basics Of Blogs And Blogging

By Chris Taylor

Have you heard other people talking on and on about their "blogs" while all you could do was smile and nod?

Yes, "blog" is a peculiar word, conjuring visions of mosquito-infested swamps, and you can't imagine why people would be eager to get more visitors to theirs.

But eager they are. In spite of the rather unfortunate name, blogs are the hottest things in communication since cell phones. Blogs are websites on which almost anybody can post information on almost any topic as often as they like. Blogs can be devoted to a single factual topic, or they can be the equivalent of personal diaries in which people record their private thoughts and observations about the world. The contents of a blog are limited only by the imagination of the blog's creator, or "author".

If you find the thought of your own blog appealing, and have an Internet-connected computer, here are some suggestions to help you both get a blog going and build an audience with whom you can share it:

First, choose a topic for your blog on which you will enjoy communicating, and prepare your material. You opinions on a subject are fine, as long as they are based on some underlying. There are always going to be those who know as much, about a topic as you, and if you want a credible blog, you need to be able to back up your statements.

Add some humor and personal experiences to your topic if you can. Writing a travel blog about places you have actually been, and about colorful locals whom you actually encountered, will
make much better reading than just posting facts and figures picked up from travel sites and TV shows. Offer material which will appeal to both novice travelers--like how to avoid pickpockets--and more seasoned ones--like the best undiscovered attractions in a specific destination.

Don't limit your blog to your own experiences. Keep it updated with news that might affect those interested in your subject. While your experiences can give people valuable insight, recognize that your opinions about what happened to you or about a specific product are, after all, just opinions. Give people factual information which they can weigh for themselves.

Keep you blog current. On the Internet, news can become old in a matter of hours, and what happened a month ago is ancient history. Telling people considering a trip to Thailand that Thailand experienced a coup last September will do nothing to help them decide about a trip next month. Updating them on the peaceful state of affairs in Thailand today, however, will.

Updating your blog will require a commitment from you. You'll need to establish a regular time to search for and write about fresh news, and get it posted. There'll be times when not much has happened, and there'll be times when you can't type fast enough. But two or three times a week are not too many to post something new. Even it it's only to tell your readers that not much has been going on, share a few thoughts, and tell your readers when to next check in for your next entry, make an appearance. Your audience will keep coming back as long as they know you are.

Keep you blog as simple as you can, without sounding like you don't have a complete grasp of your subject. You want to appeal to as many people as possible, and nothing will drive those newly interested in a subject away faster than lots of technical jargon and statistics. You can provide complex information, as long as you make the effort to put it in user-friendly terms.

Find a memorable name for your blog, and use your blog editing feature to post it in large, bold face type. "My Hiking Blog" will probably sound interesting only to Mom and Dad and only because you never write or call them while you're out adventuring. "Climbing through the Clouds" will appeal to those who either tackle the high places of the Earth, or want to.

Every so often, say, at the end of each month, archive your existing blog posts. Your blog editor will let you do this in a less than a minute. The entries will still be available for new blog readers who want to catch up, or those who want to reference your earlier writings. And list keywords for your archived work so that new traffic will be able to find its way to you.

Finally, make sure your blog is professionally presented. You have a spell checker, so use it. Proof-read your copy and correct any grammar or punctuation errors before you post your work. If you're not sure whether you are using a word properly, get help from an online dictionary. Respect your readers as intelligent, well-informed people who could just as easily spend their time elsewhere.

These suggestions may make your entry into the world of blogging more successful, but it's up to you to commit to building and keeping an audience.

About The Author:

Need to promote your blog on the search engines and get the word out about your new resource? Try our rss feed submission sites service today -
http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/rss-feed-submission-sites-service.html
Copyright © Catdynamics - 2006.

The Dirty Trick In Internet Marketing That Increases Online Sales Fast

By Jo Han Mok

This has to be one of the "best" ways to generate sales. Controversy creates two types of interest. Negative and positive. And both forms of interest work together to make you profits. How exactly?

Well, let's do a quick example. Person N and Person P. Person P loves what you have written and can directly relate to what you have said. Person N on the other hand thinks you're an obnoxious creep full of insane beliefs. Both Person P and Person N comment on your writing. They read each others comments and they are inflamed by those comments. So, they begin a back and forth battle of words based entirely on what you had to say! Now comes Person S, Person V, and Person C. They add their two cents and take sides of who's right and who's wrong. Then come more comments. And more, and more.

And if you're selling something that expands on your initial post, you'll get both those that hate what you had to say, and love it, buying your product. The negative folks will want further proof that you're a total moron while the positive folks will want to learn more about what you are teaching, or saying.

Every single day, millions of folks hop onto the internet and have something to say. Most likely they'll do this through writing. Whether it's through an article, an email, or a blog. The "trick" is to make what you discuss controversial through your writings.

Don't be "Boring". That won't do a thing for you. The essence of creating controversy is by using passion. If you've had a bad experience with another person, tell people about it. If you really love a particular product, or person, tell people about it. But be sure that your writings can convey the passion that you feel whether it's negative or positive.

If you are effectively creating controversy through your writings, most people that read it will either love what you have to say or hate it. Either way, they'll "Talk About It". And if you give them a chance to communicate how they feel about it, this will lead to more profits in your pockets!

But, in order to use controversy you have to be willing to take a stand on a certain topic. No "wishy-washy" comments will do. If you make people angry, "Good"! But don't back down on your opinions though. That defeats the purpose of using this tactic completely. If some people don't like what you're saying, who cares?? At least you had the guts to stand up for what you believe and say it. And that's the point that will come across to those that love your writings.

I "Know For A Fact" this works. Jason Cain is a living example of this dirty trick. He uses controversy in his writings and makes immense profits from the dust he stirs up. Some folks hate him. Some folks love him. The love-hate factor doesn't really matter though. What DOES matter is that people are reading what he has to say. And they are 'Listening'. And, they are BUYING.

Another terrific example is a fellow by the name of Stuart Halpryn. He creates controversy through the amount of money he charges for products he sells. He lets his readers know that he is directly responsible for pissing other marketers off by charging extremely low prices for their products to his customers. And it works! He's earning good money from using controversy

The whole idea of this tactic is to speak your mind, send off a spark, and watch it build into a roaring flame

About the Author:

Jo Han Mok is a #1 bestselling author and frequent featured speaker at Internet Marketing bootcamps and conferences. Visit his website for a simple step-by-step plan to profit online in 21 days or less! http://www.SuperFastProfit.com

Making Your Podcast Standout

By Sharon Housley

Podcasts are relatively inexpensive to create, as a result, and the quality in published podcasts is extremely diverse. Corporate podcasts can be very polished audio productions while hobbyist experimenting with podcasts may have dogs barking and children's screaming in the background.

After all it is the content that matters right? Well no, not exactly remember when black and white televisions could "kind of" tune into stations it was just a hazy effect. How many continued to watch the grainy or flipping screen. Rarely was the show so riveting did it hold the interest of the viewer. Unless of course the content was forbidden to young eyes (as in the playboy channel).

Sound Quality Matters
Having a decent quality microphone is critical to ensure that the audio recording is a quality recording. Filter out extraneous noises, or select a recording area that will not be Interrupted. Use recording software that will allow you to edit out audio snippets that are subpar.

If you generally record in the same location a fixed mic is generally better. If you do field recording you will want to consider a cordless microphone.

Intro and Extro (Outro)
Using music to introduce and end the podcast adds polish to the overall show. You can licensee rights to podsafe music that will allow you to use music in a royalty free capacity. If your show
is popular you might find that the music is linked to your show, as part of your brand, so you will want to choose it carefully. There are a number of podsafe music directories where podcasters can purchase music that is royalty free, meaning there would not be any recurring charges when using the music in a podcast.

Theme Music
As with intro and outros, theme music can add a level of professional to a podcast. It is illegal to use copyrighted music in your podcast unless you own the copyright or license it through the proper channels. Consider visiting one of the podsafe music directories to locate music that is reflective of your show.

Edit
It is not enough to record the audio for a show. Polished podcasts are produced using audio editing software. The editing software allows podcasters the ability to filter unwanted noises and edit any dead air or parts of the show you dislike.

Catchy Relevant Name
Keep in mind that many listeners will find your podcast through a web page or search engine. Your podcasts title should be catchy and related to the podcasts content. The podcasts title should contain a slogan that conveys the general theme of the show.

Add iTunes Tags
The Apple iTunes Music Store has a huge audience. Podcasters can tap the iPod audience by adding the appropriate iTunes tags to their podcast. There are software applications that will walk you through the process of adding iTunes to podcast feeds. After adding the tags simply submit your podcast for inclusion in the iTunes Music Store. The listing should appear within a few weeks.

Spin-It
Podcasts are now a dime a dozen. In order to truly stand out the show needs a unique angle, a unique view, an interesting perspective, something different from all the other podcasts out there.

Logo / Image
Add an image to your podcast feed, the extra step will add a bit of polish to your show. Many podcatchers or RSS readers will display the image beside the podcast listing. The visual effect will make your podcast jump out of the list.

Understand Demographic
Who are Your Listeners? Understanding your audience will allow you to cater to them. Know the demographics of your target audience. A well-defined target audience will also help you find show sponsors or advertisers.

SEO for Podcasts
Optimize your podcast shows summary for search engines. Be sure to include keywords or related resources in the podcast feed. This will allow search engines to spider the text for words that relate to your podcast.

Transcript or Show Notes
Many podcasters neglect to include a show transcript, podcasters should consider including detailed show notes or a transcript of the show in the description of the podcast feed. If you display the feed this will increase the likelihood that those interested will find your show in the search engines and podcast directories.

Podcast Length
The show should only be as long as necessary, without being a rambling. Most listeners will have a limited amount of time to listen to podcasts, as a result they will be selective about what they listen to.

Keep it Regular
Create a recording schedule and stick to it, if you don't have time to do it properly then skip a show, your listeners will appreciate that you did not waste their time.

Podcasts are becoming more and more commonplace, distinguish your podcast by polishing it and properly publicizing it.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

Rss To Blog Pro - A 6-Month Review

By Will Lee

Background
Search engines are particularly interested in websites with constantly updated, relevant content. Websites that appear static without a supply of fresh content may be viewed as dormant and in their drive to provide the latest, most relevant search results to users, search engines may rank such a website lower than a website that is updated regularly.

What Is It?
RSS to Blog Pro is a fully automated blog posting tool offering self-updating websites. It's a PHP script that is installed on a single web hosting account. From this centralised installation, multiple blogs can be maintained with fresh content from various sources. Also available is an earlier, non-pro version, which has the same basic functionality, but requires a separate install for each blog it maintains.

What Problem Does It Solve?
Adding fresh - and importantly, relevant - content to websites can be a resource consuming task. Either you spend time finding and creating new content or you pay someone to do it for you. Without fresh content, your websites can appear stagnant and drop off the search engines radar. This impacts your website rankings in search results and ultimately has a detrimental
effect on any free traffic coming from the search engines. If your websites rely on search engine traffic then this can mean their downfall.

What Are The Benefits?
RSS to Blog Pro tackles the problem of needing to regularly update website content by automating the whole process from finding relevant content based upon keywords that you provide through to posting content to your website blog. In the eyes of search engines, updating a website with irrelevant content isn't nearly as good as having relevant content. The tighter your niche, the better chances you have of ranking higher as you'll be competing with a smaller number of websites. Using a scattergun approach to website content can mean you end up competing with websites across a large number of niches.

If you're building content websites with the aim of earning an AdSense income then you'll know that the ads shown are dependant upon the surrounding content on your webpages. Irrelevant content results in ads that are irrelevant to your website visitors, which means they'll have no interest in clicking on them and your generated income will be poor.

Features

* Supports multiple blog types including WordPress, Blogger Blogs, Movable Type, Type Pad, Live Journal and MSN Spaces.
* Keywords and RSS feeds can be specified for automatic content generation or you can supply your own content.
* Posting to your blogs can be scheduled at random intervals e.g. once or twice a day so that posting appears natural.
* There are no 'footprints' to identify the content as being automatically generated.
* Log records are kept so you can see exactly what has been posted and to where.
* Built-in ping functionality for blog and ping.
* A single installation will post to an unlimited number of blogs.
* Regular updates.
* User support forum.
* Two tier affiliate programme offering 40% commission to the top level and 10% for any sales from affiliates you recruit.

My Experience With RSS to Blog Pro Since August 2005, I've been using RSS to Blog Pro on an
increasing number of blogs in various niches. I'm pleased to be able to say that my income from AdSense has increased month upon month since then. With the software installed on my virtual
private server (VPS), I currently manage around 50 blogs, posting relevant new content every day or two. I'd recommend that you don't install RSS to Blog Pro onto a shared server because if you're updating a large number of websites or you're running the script frequently (every couple of minutes) then your host is likely to take a dim view on it. Considering how inexpensive and how much more reliable a VPS is to operate there just isn't any reasonable justification for risking a shared server. A VPS is like having your own server, completely isolated from any other peoples websites so you can't affect them and they can't affect you. There is the exception of disk IO, but that isn't something that should be of any real concern.

The issue of relevancy is really what makes the difference between an effective auto content generation tool and one that will never do anything for your bottom line. I can't stress it enough; without relevant content, search engines won't be able to categorise your niche and won't be able to rank you fairly amongst your peers. That means you won't do well in searches in your subject area. It also could mean your website will serve ads for tennis equipment when your niche is dog care. Visitors looking for information about dog care are highly unlikely to be interested in tennis equipment when they come to your website because it's not something which is relevant to their needs at that time.

There's no doubt that this helps to keep those websites looking fresh and my website stats show a constant stream of visits to my blog pages each month. And of course, lots of targetted visitors and lots of targetted content means a lot of clicks on targetted ads!

Support-wise, Michelle (creator of RSS to Blog Pro) has answered my email queries promptly and there's an active user forum for peer support. Michelle also visits the forum to provide assistance although some queries can take a couple of days for a response, however the user base, support forum and software is mature enough to be able to cope with almost every common question a new user might have.

Fortunately, the software is easy to install and set-up so you can expect to be running within an hour or two.

One feature that I haven't used is the ability to ping blog directories from within RSS to Blog Pro. The reason for this is that if I pinged these websites for every post made to each of my blogs then I'd actually end up pinging up to 50 times a day from the same domain (the domain on which RSS to Blog Pro is installed). Rather than risk being blacklisted for pinging too much and hogging the resources of the directories, I use the ping facility from with my WordPress blog software instead so that the individual pings come from the individual domains. Again, this will appear to be a lot more natural and it also helps RSS to Blog Pro to work more efficiently by decoupling some of the work away from it.

Conclusion
After 6 months of constant usage, I'm pretty happy with RSS to Blog Pro's performance. and would definitely recommend it to anyone who is wanting to have self-updating websites that attract targetted traffic. Care needs to be taken when selecting a host for the script, but once installed, operation of the script is simple and reliable. An excellent script in the toolbox of AdSense earners and affiliate marketers alike.

About The Author:

Will Lee is the Internet Marketing Fool (http://www.internetmarketingfool.com), sharing real life Internet Marketing advice and product reviews. RSS to Blog (http://www.rsstoblogg.com) is an automated blogging tool, created by Michelle Timothy. United Articles(http://www.unitedarticles.com) offers free syndicated content.

Become a Search Engine All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

By Judith Kallos

Everyone wants top 10 rankings as though just because they wished it that should make it so. Wishing has nothing to do with rankings. Unless you have a genie in a bottle, we all know it simply just doesn't work that way.

How about I get you thinking differently about this issue?

Don't Chase Search Engines-Let Them Chase You!

How is that possible?

Become a Search Engine All-You-Can-Eat Buffet!!

I can hear you out there.. "Yeah, sure!" Well, it's not that difficult of a methodology really. All you have to do is think differently than all the hype, amateur Web designers and unscrupulous marketing "gurus" have led you to believe about how getting found works.

First off, what search engines like is fresh content and lots of it; yummy! That's the fuel for their fire so to speak. So it goes without saying that if you keep adding new content on a regular basis that will encourage search engines to visit your site because you'll have a fresh buffet of tempting entrées.

How do search engines know you have new content? Certainly not by osmosis!

If you make the effort in the appropriate areas, much of which the costs are minimal, they'll get a whiff of the appetizing content you have to offer and act like they are at an all-you-can-eat buffet!! Your site will be like Mama's house on a Sunday afternoon. You know what I mean; dinner smells so good everyone in the house can't wait to get a plateful! That's how it goes with search engines and content.

If you don't have savory content-why should search engines visit you and give you higher rankings over those who serve up a delicious all-you-can-eat Sunday dinner? The answer is they don't.

The "build it and they will come" way of thinking does not apply to Web sites in this day and age, so everyone needs to wash that concept right out of their hair. All it takes is for you to be prepared to mix, cook and serve. Mix up a new article, cook it to perfection and serve it to the hungry search engines!

That's not too much to ask to succeed online is it? If it is, well, maybe you should reconsider your online endeavors. If you don't want to make these efforts, just forget about achieving no charge organic/natural listings. You'll never rank anywhere near the top so determine your PayPerClick budget and go setup your campaign straight away.

Now let's setup your buffet! Start a blog that you post to continually and submit it to all the blog directories. Make sure your blog offers a subscribe feature so visitors get notified by e-mail when you enter a new post. Also offer RSS and podcasting feeds of your blog posts so that visitors can get your information in as many flavors as they choose. See? Your mouthwatering buffet is growing!

Onliners visit your blog and then follow the links to the scrumptious new articles on your site. They like your articles and link to them or post them on their site with a link to yours. Incoming links to your site; lip smacking good!

You also offer an RSS feed of your top articles to get the word out. You add your new articles to your site map. Google checks for your site map XML file and updates its index with your freshly baked content. You add your seasoned articles to all the article banks that have popped up in the last year or so-more delectable links to your site! Can you see what is happening? We are creating a feeding frenzy!

This interactive medium called the Web is now more interactive than ever. At first when it all began, "interactive" meant some flashing this or moving that. Now interactive means just that; you need to interact and be involved by using all these tools or you'll be left in the dumpster by those who do.

One thing is sure; chasing search engine algorithms is a futile effort at best. But when you have the nourishment they want, tasty content, search engines are hungry little bots and it's hard to keep them away. Food for thought? You bet! Open your own buffet today and feed the beast!

About the Author:

Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse who has played @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her new Dot Com Business Starter Kit @
http://www.DotComStarterKit.com

Blog Archives And Seo

By Chris Angus

When most people visit your site, the most articles that they will see is anywhere from three to fifteen depending on the length of them and whether or not you have linked them "behind the fold." Behind the Fold means that they are stuffed in your archives. Of course, this begs the question, Are these search engine optimized blogs lost forever in the archives or are they still accessible to search engines?

The good news that even though your blog posts from the past are not displayed on the blog page but this does not mean that they are not accessible to the search engines or your readers.
Most blog software and online providers supply some kind of archiving system so that readers can easily search your blog for other articles. In fact a little box that allows your readers to search a blog is a good plug in to look for when you are choosing a provider.

Sometimes the archives are listed in a separate list on another page by date or subject. On other templates, there may be a list of general categories scrolling down one side of your blog that people can click on to read other subjects. Another possibility is that a calendar object may be put on the page so that people can look up the blogs in the archive by date. Another technique
is to keep all of your category headings for your blogs as keyworded titles and to maintain a lot of them. The more categories you have describing your blog archives the more keywords you will have available to the search engines.

Even though these posts are not archived on your front page they are still searchable through the search engines. The more articles you have in your archives the more visible your site is likely to be in the search engines.

About The Author:

Christopher Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at) Brilliantseo.com
http://www.illustratemyname.com
http://www.mobility-direct.co.uk http://www.seocompanyuk.com

Advertise On My Site! - A Complete Review.

By Nick P. Bentley

Undoubtedly one of the hottest trends on the Internet today is blogging. The numbers are simply mind-boggling if one has to compare the number of blogs that have been created. This is an incredible way to interact with people who share similar interests and likes as you. This new world serves as a great networking tool. In fact I first discovered this when I decided to advertise on my blog.

At times I post freelance writing jobs on my blog for other writers. Employers advertise on my site indirectly. On the other hand this service is extremely appreciated by a number of my visitors who are in search for work. Instead of visiting countless web pages, many writers come directly to my blog to see what I advertise on my site.

Personally I like consistency so I prefer to take on solid projects with reliable clients. Nonetheless, there is something very appealing about the thrill of the chase. Despite the fact that I don't advertise on my site to find work for myself however I do get a kick out of hunting down the offers. Besides I appreciate the feedback given from the writers who find work through my blog. I simply cannot imagine looking for work on a daily basis. Well, actually, I can because I do search every day. Frankly speaking I really can't imagine relying on the search for my livelihood.

A number of the readers who visit the blog sometimes leave messages just to let me know that they were hired for one project or another. For sure, these messages make my day! I'm
happy to know that the site is doing some good. Unfortunately, one of my readers became offended that I use Google advertisements on my site. Indeed she wanted to know why I advertise on my blog for profit. Well, the profit is quite small. In fact I have found that writers are not really clickers. And in my opinion I also think that clicking on one or two ads is not a big price for the service I provide. Now this brings to mind the question about blog etiquette. A lot of seasoned bloggers get aggravated by the site of advertisements. Nevertheless, these readers should consider the purpose of the site before passing judgment.

The reason behind why I advertise on my site is because it offers a valuable service. Of course, the reader has the option of scrolling down past the advertisements if he isn't happy with them. There is absolutely no obligation at all to click on an ad. The fact is that several of my readers commented that they didn't even notice that I advertise on my blog until the complaint was posted on my site. I'd like to thank that person for complaining. This way my readers are taking time to give me a few clicks now!

About The Author:

Nick P. Bentley provides readers with up-to-date commentaries, articles, and reviews for http://www.insights-on-marketing.com, http://www.all-business-talk.com as well as other related information.

Removing Bloggers Block

By Chris Taylor

Some of you may have already experienced writer's, or in this case blogger's, block. This is when you can't seem to start blogging anything worthwhile, sometimes not even a single word's worth.

How could this happen when you were so good at blogging before? Why is it that you can't get one word written? And the most frustrating thing of all: the more time you spend thinking about blogging, the less able you are to start your next project! Is there any cure? Luckily, there are a few things you can try.

Visiting other people's blogs is a good start. Read through your favorite ones, or do a random blog search and see what gets turned up. Reading what other people have to say can spark your own creativity and send you over the hump of blogger's block. Leave some comments to get you started; you might be able to expand on their ideas, and sometimes you can track back to your own blog. Looking at your blog inbox can help, too, as there might be a question or comment there that can get you started.

Look for a word or topic. Then begin writing about it. You can also do this with pictures. Check out photos and think of something to write about it. You can also check the news, which is always rich with current events. Even if there isn't anything that directly relates to what you normally write about, writing about something completely different than your normal topics
can help.

If those things do not seem to work for you, you can search for creative or journal writing software to help you with your writing problem. Oftentimes, these things have suggestions of
topic or idea that can help you get started.

Think about an extraordinary topic. For example, you can research about inventions and inventors. What was the first car ever invented? Anything that you fancy can become a blog entry. You can look for answers to questions like the one about the car at online resources like encyclopedias and almanacs. When you have the answer, blog about it. You never know, maybe some people are thinking of the same things and you have answered their questions. Besides, it can be good to drift from your usual topic one in awhile. Your readers might feel refreshed by
the change.

If none of these exercises help, it might be time to do something unrelated to writing for a while. Sometimes we just need a break from writing! Go outside, go shopping, go to a movie. Anything to take your mind off of your blog. You just might feel refreshed and ready to start blogging once you get back up in front of your computer.

There are a lot more ways to beat blogger's block. If you come up with something new that helps you get over it, think of what a good blog topic your experience would be! Who knows, you may even help someone out there who is struggling with blogger's block!

About The Author:

Visit http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com today! Your comprehensive guide to rss and blogs including our http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/rss-feed-submission-sites-service.html.

Bloggers Can Make Money Using Adsense

By Mario Churchill

Money can now be made by sharing one's opinion. Is this a joke? No it is for real. This is because blogs are one of the things people love to look at these days when surfing in the web.

It is not that hard to make a blog. A user can download a template and put the content there or make one up using wizard.

The trick to making money is being able to find a niche market. This means finding something relevant to talk about that people can relate to that can be done through research.

When the blog site is ready, it is time to do one pre-flight check to make sure all the systems are working. It is such a huge turnoff when it is not user friendly enough to the public.

The only way to get people to see the blog is to advertise. This means coming up with important keywords that someone will normally type so that the website will appear in a few seconds.

There are many search engines on the web. The person should not be afraid of paying a small amount to be able work with some of the best in the industry such as Yahoo, Google or MSN to get more traffic.

The best way to get more viewers is to narrow down the market. Some search engines have a target ad system so that those of the same interest will be informed about the person's blog
site.

Google's version is called Adsense. The system uses a java script code. When it is ready, the person will have to endorse it to the search engine for inspection. If there are no problems, this will shortly be updated to the main server.

How does the person make money-using Adsense? When a site is made, Google will be the one posting ads in the site. Every time a customer buys something, the developer will get a commission from the transaction. So, more visitors turns into more revenue.

The best way for people to know that such a blog exists will be to tell friends and family members about it so the word will get around.

If the topic posted does not get that much attention, perhaps the issue is not that relevant anymore. Blogging is really trial and error so the person should again go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that the viewers would love to read and even tell others.

There are three requirements for anyone who wishes to use Adsense. The website developed by the person must have 10 to 15 pages of relevant information. The second is that this should be
user-friendly. Lastly, it must not have too many ads around because this will just distract the visitor from exploring the site any further.

Studies show that the number of blogs are increasing daily. This will double or even triple as various sites are also giving members the opportunity to express opinion.

It is very rare that topic for the blog will be an overnight success. There are also other people who have said something about the topic and the person has to find a way to beat the
competition.

The most important thing to do when it is up and running is to conduct maintenance checks and have updates regularly so that there is always something new to show to visitors.

About The Author:

Mario Churchill is a freelance author and has written over 200 articles on various subjects. For more information about an excellent business opportunity checkout http://www.starscapes.com

Blog Traffic Tips - Get More Blog Traffic

By Jeff Phelps

Blog traffic is crucial if you are in the business of making money with your blog. If your blog traffic is low, chances are so is your revenue. So how do you increase your blog traffic? Easy if you follow these basic steps:

Post On Niche Related Forums

Please don't spam. Search for the forums that can be added to the niche that you wish to promote. Carefully study the entire discussed topic and relate it to the questions asked during the discussion. The discussion can also answer personal questions. Make sure that in every discussion made, you put a small resource box at the end of it to serve as a link to your blog
(not always your homepage). Many forums will have you tossed if all you do is promote affiliate products, so don't do it! It is necessary to put your bio in every end of your postings with a
relevant keyword link back to your blog. Do not pursue with some of the forums that do not allow the posting of a resource box.

Write Your Own Content

You can pass an article or web content in many websites. Usually, these sites are free and if you are cash tight, you can pass your own made web contents initially. Writing your own web content will save you a ton of cash, but will also cost you a lot of time. There are freelance writers that will do the work for you, but there is something to be said about having your own personally written content. Therefore, it is wise to do your own article. The article that you will be writing must match the niche of your blog. Put knowledge that you know into every writings, you can discuss tips, tricks, guidelines that you get from your own life experiences. This will encourage your blog traffic to frequently visit your site.

Get Involved In Link Exchanges

This is the most effective way to bring traffic in your blog. This is a careful study of all the links shown on the search engines. It is important to secure the sites that are linked to you to have topics same to your blog. Blog traffic is generated if the same subject is seen on the recommendation by the site that you share your subject with. There will be an increased
chance of reaching the highest rank with the benefit of linking with other site or search engines. Both sites exchanging links will benefit from this exercise. Don't get involved with "link farms". Send an email to the blogger you wish to exchange links with and simply ask if they are willing to exchange links. You will be surprised how many say yes. Also, if you create well written, highly niche targeted posts, bloggers will link to that post creating tons of "search-engine loved" one way links.

Create A Newsletter

If you have regular blog traffic, you must develop a newsletter for your readers. Your newsletter can be either on weekly or monthly basis. This can sometimes seem too difficult for the new blogger, but this is the time to use those freelance writers. Have them write 5-10 articles on your niche, and use those as your newsletter. You should only put a small resources
box after every article. The small box will serve as the link back to your blog. This will surely increase your blog traffic and returning visitors. If your customers like it, they may
even recommend you to their friends, relatives and colleagues.

Join Traffic Exchanges

This is another form of exchange links allowing the member to view each other's blog posts by surfing. By surfing to the blog, you are gaining points, the more you surf the more points
you receive. You are also given an option to gain credits. This will not produce much blog traffic but it will obtain the names for your visitors by using squeeze pages. If you display Google
Adsense on your site, be careful joining traffic exchanges as it can violate Google's TOS.

Follow thes 5 steps and watch your blog traffic grow. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. Stay patient, stay focused and work hard to increase your blog traffic.

About The Author:

Don't give up, success is right around the corner. Check out my blog for more
http://rugjeff.com/187/blog-traffic-analysis-tips/ and get your
http://elands1.com/12/profitable-business-internet-marketing-opportunity/
seen.

Deciding Whether To Blog Or Not To Blog

Dee Owens

Blogging has grown in the last few years, with more and more
people doing it everyday. If you can write in a diary or
journal you can blog, it really is that simple. When you make
entries into your blog site, they are listed newest to oldest.
There is also no limit on what you can blog about, from food to
romance, or maybe even your chosen career you will find
something to talk about.

So you have decided to blog. Now what? Well the first step is
to set up an account on either a blogging site or a personal
website. There are many free websites out there so do not let
money be a factor in your decision, let coverage. You are going
to write down a daily, weekly, or monthly account of what is
happening and lets face it, you not only want people to read
it, you need them too. Therefore, your first step is to type
blog or blogging into your favorite Search Engine and see who
pops up the most, and then second most, and so on and so forth.
Once you have your say top five blogging sites, go to each one
and check out what they offer compared to the other guys. Who
is free maybe, or guarantees fresh content, possibly even
helping you set up your blogging page.

Wait I said guarantees fresh content, why would you need a
website to provide fresh content? It's simple really you want
to keep visitors coming to your website right; well fresh
content is what does it. They make sure you do not have a
repeat of what someone else has written, and they help keep all
the current topics there on your blogging site.

So you have found your blogging site, it is all set up and
ready for content, now what do you write about? Well I
recommend first introducing your product. Take a couple of
paragraphs explaining what it is all about. Next, take a moment
to talk about you. Possibly where you are from, what made you
start your business, even how you have experience in it.

Now that you have your first entry, take time each day, week,
or month depending on your needs and update your site. By
setting, this schedule and keeping to it you guarantee people
to see what you are all about and at the same time showing your
dedication to getting the job done. Remember life happens though
and if for some reason your newest blog is late, do not stress
over it. Make your first sentence about how you know it has
been a while, make your apology and begin talking.

Writing is talking with your fingers on a piece a paper,
website, or email, all you have to do is remember to keep the
conversation going. On this point, I have another suggestion
for your blogging site. Put a comment box in it. No there is no
guarantee that someone will leave a posting but then again they
just might and you can focus your next blog on answering them.
Hey, why not tell your friends and family about your new blog
they may even leave a comment for you to discuss.

Hope this helps you in your blogging career I know it has in
mine.

About The Author:

Dee Owens writes articles for
http://www.articles3000.com. A free ezine articles site.

Understanding RSS Patents And Meta Data

Danny Wirken

Understanding RSS Patents And Meta Data

There are some issues regarding patent applications of RSS and
different aspects of Meta Data and what its overall effects
would be. When companies are able to patent obvious technical
innovations and successfully prevent other companies from
moving forward, an unhealthy situation occurs. So how do
patents really work in the software industry?

Are Patents Important?

Some say that the US Patent System has become a murky swamp for
the tech industry where only corporations with deep pockets are
considered safe. The long standing resistance to patents is
based on the belief that it has become a barrier to innovation.
The idea that a small firm's freedom to innovate is curtailed by
the existence of so many patents in the software industry
persists. At least one research contradicts this premise that
large companies use claims of patent infringement to fend-off
smaller competitors. It further claims that small businesses
can actually use patents to their advantage even in an industry
that has seen an explosion of new patents in the past decades.

The experts' advice to small companies is to come up with a
patent strategy before starting operation. Research data would
show that there is a significant correlation between the
pursuit of patents and the future success of start-ups. It has
been found out that start-ups with patents are four times more
likely to go public than those without. Only half of this
number is expected to fail especially as they receive much more
in financing. The people that excel in this area are those that
recognize threats to their developed technology as a serious
problem. Those that do not bother to take steps for
intellectual property protection consistently fared worse.

Newly published patent applications can be searched at the US
Patent and Trademark Office. It can be done online by browsing
through industry category or by doing keyword search. The site
provides searches by keyword and lists of patents applications
by location, agent and law firm name, city of the agent and
inventor name.

RSS Patents and the Different Aspects of Meta Data

When Apple Computer filed for patents on some uses of RSS as
well as patents covering Meta Data management, it gave rise to
a prolonged and extended discussion about its probable effects.
One applied patent deals with variable length posts. A user can
modify how a feed is displayed, in what order and how it is
formatted in one embodiment. This also includes how much of a
particular content is to be displayed. Another embodiment
provides modification regarding how a displayed feed is stored
so that it can be used again at a later time.

There is also a filed patent that deals directly with
auto-discovery. Disclosure of technique for detecting, managing
and presenting syndication XML feeds is done. An embodiment
allows a web browser to automatically determine when a web site
is publishing feeds and notifies the user for easy access. One
other embodiment facilitates browser capability to determine
whether a web page or feed is advertising relationship XML
while displaying information about the people identified with
such.

A series of Apple related patent applications include one that
makes some broad claims for a web browser user interface that
enables a user to switch between displaying a file and
displaying a feed related to the file. There are also
applications that make claims on managing Meta Data and
indices. These claims are considered incredibly broad as one
application basically claim that Apple owns the ability to
aggregate Meta Data from two or more programs for searching.

There is a fear that if such application with a very broad
coverage is approved, it could effectively lock out all
newcomers from the field. It could easily impact other player's
ability to implement its search techniques as well. Whether or
not such a scenario is possible, one thing remains clear: users
will not appreciate anything that gets in the way of improving
the feed-reading experience.

An abstract of a patent application for methods and systems for
managing data such as Meta Data appears this way. In one method,
Meta Data from files created by several different software
applications are captured which is then searched. The type of
information in Meta Data from one type of file differs from the
type of information in Meta Data for another type of file. Other
methods are described as well as data processing systems and
machine-readable media.

A patent application for the methods and apparatuses for
processing Meta Data is as follows: One embodiment provides
that when a file having Meta Data is received, the Meta Data or
at least a portion of the content of the file is extracted from
the file to generate a first set of Meta Data. An analysis is
performed on the extracted Meta Data and the content to be able
to generate a second set of Meta Data. This may include Meta
Data in addition to the first set. The second set may then be
stored in a database suitable to be searched for identification
or location of the file. Other methods and applications are
likewise described.

For methods and systems for managing an index database, the
patent application is as follows: An index database is stored
on a machine readable volume with an operating system and the
files which have been indexed. After storing, the volume is
made available for distribution to licensees or customers. The
volume will include a previously created index database which
allows the user to begin use of the index database without
having to perform an indexing operation.

Another patent application for systems and methods for managing
Meta Data provides that a search through the Meta Data database
is performed. This is done when a selection of at least one
file having Meta Data stored in a Meta Data database is
received and a selection of a command to search using at least
a portion of the Meta Data is also received. This particular
application likewise describes other methods, data processing
systems and machine readable media.

It would be very interesting to see if claims such as those
mentioned above will survive. The approval of patent
applications largely depends on the claim having precedence
over the practices of others. Non-obviousness is another
consideration which can be used as a main argument against most
patent applications.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Using Bloggers For Pushing Products: A Good Idea?

Article written by: Danny Wirken

There is an interesting conversation in the blogosphere. The discussion centers on using bloggers to push products and getting compensated in return. Should bloggers accept monetary
payment or any form of remuneration for writing about certain products, services or events on their blogs?

Issues and Views

Now that blogging is spreading like wildfire, drawing large crowds of audience, business advertisers, sponsors and the like are one in advocating it as an effective means of advertising -
getting a company's message out. It is now everyday staple to see advertising on personal blogs. Leading companies like Microsoft, Nokia, and General Motors have even joined the "blogwagon'. Top management executives like Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz and Intel chief Paul Otellini now blog. It is a fact that word from a trusted source holds much water to consumers. Word of mouth is undoubtedly the most effective form of advertising. Marketing people put a lot of weight into pursuing free publicity. Aware of the massive growth of blogs and the increasing clout and its being a trusted medium, it isn't surprising that bloggers are being used to promote products, services or events. Blogs have the ability to disseminate information instantly to a widespread audience.

Everyday, more companies are paying bloggers in cash or in kind for promotional spaces on their blogs be it in the form of outright sponsorship or product reviews. Most bloggers keen to keep their blogs financially sustainable openly accept sponsorship and carry ads on their blogs.

A problem now looms. Blogging has no established code of ethics regarding bloggers accepting compensation for blog coverage. The immediate issue bloggers will have to address is whether bloggers can accept payment in any form for writing about specific topics. If yes, a subsequent issue is disclosure and transparency. Certain events have brought these issues into focus. These events have sparked engaging discussions and varied views on the appropriateness of all these going ons in the blogosphere.

Marqui, a Vancouver company that sells communication management services for automating websites announced its experimental program - paying bloggers to mention the company in their blogs. The aim is to increase brand awareness among the powerful members of the software developer community. Marqui signed up 20 bloggers. Under the program, bloggers are mandated to display Marqui icon and mention Marqui in their blog posts at least once a week. They are free to write anything positive or negative. They are at liberty to blog openly about Marqui products or pursue a different approach. In return, they will be paid $800 a month. In depth details of the program rules together with an FAQ section are posted online in Marqui's own blog. According to Stephen King, Marqui CEO, the program has been a success. Company mentions on Google skyrocketed. Marqui has been swamped with reader feedbacks on its products. Conversely, the program has drawn many criticisms.

Rob Greenlee of WebTalkRadio commented that it is unnatural to think that a paid blogger would post negative comments about a sponsor. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante's weblog network threatened that the Marqui program will turn the blogosphere into a graffiti-laden slum where the readers won't be able to distinguish if a blog posting is genuine or a paid message. In his response, King defended that if a reader comes across a blog and sees the part that is sponsored, certainly there will be skepticism. However, bloggers disclose their relationship with Marqui, write both positive and negative comments without fear of any deletion from Marqui. Another blogger feels that the Marqui program just needs some fine tuning. Disclosure of payment arrangement between Marqui and participating blogger should be mandatory. Contracts of bloggers should not be renewed based on positive write-ups they provided or whether they are amenable to writing product reviews, be it favorable or unfavorable.

Newsweek revealed that 100 influential members of the tech community, Silicon Valley, were periodically offered products or services in return for word of mouth endorsements (or not). BzzAgent, a Boston company enlisted volunteers to call up bookstores to generate buzz for a particular book, feigning ignorance. A recent service called Pay Per Post patterned after pay per click business model pays a blogger a commission for each completed (clicked) post that promotes the advertiser's product or service. All these different situations point to a need for some ethical standards bloggers should adhere to. Some basic guidelines have to be set.

Blog Ethics and Standards

Bloggers are known to be non-conformists. This distinct characteristic distinguishes them from the rest in the online world. They are typically beholden to no one. They are defiant in the face of authority. Bloggers comment and spread information according to their own unconventional standards. On the contrary, it is also this freedom that may jeopardize their integrity and thus their value.

At present there are no definite ethical standards that lay down a blogger's responsibilities and provide a clear code of conduct that will ensure his integrity. Bloggers have no definitive code of ethics but there are some general principles that are widely held. Transparency is the hallmark of blogging. It is one of the weblog's distinct characteristic and greatest strength. A blogger should be transparent with regards to his actions, motives and financial considerations. Since blogging is a trusted medium, it is to every blogger's advantage to disclose conflicts of interest(monetary or otherwise) when appropriate. A blogger who is given free access to a service he
is reviewing or receives a product for review should disclose said fact. Subsequently, there is an implicit understanding that the blogger will be objective and honest. Anyway, a company should not expect a positive review just because the product was provided for free. It will not do the company any good if a reviewer just sings praises. If there is a problem with the product, the company would surely like to be informed to make the necessary improvements. Readers will be properly informed and form their own judgments. A blogger should in all instances maintain independence and integrity. Lost trust is extremely hard to regain, in some instances, never regained. A very important tenet that any blogger knows by heart is to publish as fact only that which he strongly believes is true. He should be open about his sources, biases and actions.

In a nutshell, using bloggers to push products may be acceptable to some, but others may frown on it. As for bloggers, it is a matter of choice. A blogger may be open to accepting payments to help build buzz for a product on his blog or not. If he does choose to accept compensation, transparency and disclosure are of utmost importance. His reputation is stake.

About The Author:http://www.theinternetone.net/

Google's Online Feed Reader Application

Article written by: Danny Wirken

Nothing is more frustrating than being inundated with
information from the blogging community when you are clueless
as how to manage all these content especially the ones you are
interested in. In this regard, Google's online feed reader
application, Google Reader, can be of great help. Google Reader
will keep track of all these fresh contents (feeds) making it
easier to keep up with your ever-increasing list of contents
from across the blogosphere.

Feeds, Feed Readers - Terms You Should Know

One way to manage blog updates is through the use of feeds.
Feeds are small files just like web pages. Blogs have links or
these orange buttons labeled XML, RSS or Atom. All these are
feed formats. They let you gather updates from a wide variety
of blogs and display these fresh updates all in one place as
they come in. This feature is referred to as syndication,
aggregation or simply subscribing. Most blog publishers use RSS
format which stands for Really Simple Syndication format.

The best way to subscribe to feeds is to use a feed reader. A
feed reader is sometimes called a news reader, news aggregator,
blog reader, RSS reader or RSS client. A feed reader is a type
of software or program that retrieves syndicated content
supplied in the form of feed published by blogs. A feed reader
maintains a list of blogs you are subscribed to, check them for
updates at your determined intervals and displays these contents
in a readable format. There are basically two types of feed
readers - application-based and web-based.

Application-based feed readers or installable desktop programs
are simple software applications that are installed on the
computer. Whenever you go online, they check the RSS feeds for
blogs you are subscribed to and display the new posts into the
reader on your computer. Feed Demon (Windows) and NetNewsWire
(Mac OS X) are popular application-based feed readers.

If you prefer to use an online service to track and manage your
feeds, then a web-based feed reader is the one for you. It works
in a web browser to collect all the blogs to which you are
subscribed to in one place online. Any upgrade or new features
are added automatically. What is more, you can check feeds from
any computer. Google Reader is one fine example of a web-based
feed reader.

Google Reader - Fresh Content at your Doorstep

As part of Google's grand vision to bring together personalized
web content to make information more relevant to users, it has
launched its online feed reader application, Google Reader
Beta. This brings Google closer to becoming a one-stop portal
for your e-mail, hand-picked news and other information.

Google Reader is a web-based feed reader which aggregates feeds
from blogs. It is capable of reading RSS and Atom feeds. It has
a clean and easy interface that allows you to manage which
content you have read, save them, organize them and categorize
them for future reference.

Instead of regularly visiting individual blogs for updates,
Google Reader will do the job for you. Google Reader will keep
you updated about all the online information you are interested
in. They can be news blogs or even your friends' blogs.

To avail of this service, you must have a Google account. If
you have a registered account with Gmail, you can use your
username and password to sign in to Google Reader. If you don't
have a Google Account, you can access the reader by logging on
to http://www.google.com/reader. To enjoy Google Reader's
amazing features, make sure you are using either one of these
browsers - IE 6. Firefox 1.0+, Safari 1.3+, Netscape 7.2+ and
1.7+.

Google Reader Cool Features - A Quick Run Down

Google Reader is a complete feed reader. It also adheres to
Google's trademark simple, easy-to-use design principle. The
neat layout of Google Reader makes it easy to search for and
scroll through feeds. Content is organized into four sections-
Home Page, Your Subscriptions, Read Items and Starred.

To search for feeds, you can use the search box at the upper
left top of the screen. Finding content is easy, just type a
specific publication, name, author, or topic and click "search
for new content" and Google Reader will retrieve up to ten
results. You can then subscribe by clicking the subscribe
button adjacent to each search result. Google Reader will
monitor the blog for updates and add them to your reading list.
Google Reader has two panes, the left displays the reading list
and the feeds you subscribe to and a preview pane on the right
that allows you to read the full feed content.

Content can be displayed by date or automatic sorting which
prioritizes content based on relevance to you. You can choose
whether or not you like content you've already read to remain
in your reading list. However, you can still view read items
not in your reading list by clicking on the "Read Items" button
at the top of the Home Page. Google Reader allows you to
retrieve a listing of read items. You might want to look
through the last 50 items to come up with trends or enable you
to complete a search.

As mentioned earlier, when you find content you want to read on
a regular basis, you can subscribe to it and Google Reader will
monitor that blog for updates and add them to your reading
list. You can also use the "Edit Subscriptions" link to edit or
add to your subscription list. The subscription link displays a
user's current, past and deleted subscriptions. It allows you
to view details such as dates and specific tags used. Current
subscriptions can be found in the reading list.

You may also add tags or labels to feeds you've read that are
somewhat connected. Feeds about computers may be tagged
"computers", "electronics", "information technology".
Similarly, you can also label an item with a star. These
starred items are presented as a list of entries with feed URL,
tags, published and updated periods included. Google Reader
treats starred items as a special type of tag. Moreover, if you
use the tagging/labeling feature of Google Reader, you can share
them.

Google Reader allows you to share what you read with friends.
You can send a list to your starred items in Google Reader.
Anyone who clicks on this link is taken to a public version of
Google Reader (no log-in required) that displays the content
with your shared label. If you have a Gmail account, you can
click the "Send Email" button to automatically compose an
e-mail to go with the link. Another way you can share is to put
a clip on your blog with fresh content from your reading list. A
clip is a condensed list of current headlines from contents with
a specific label that can be posted on a blog. Any visitor can
then view the latest headlines from a label you are sharing.

Another cool feature of Google Reader is the keyboard
shortcuts. They save time by helping you scan your reading list
without the hassle of moving your hand back and forth between
the keyboard and the mouse. Navigation becomes much easier.

Give the Google Reader a test drive and experience for yourself
how easy it is to manage content overload from the blogosphere.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Blog Marketing Miracles: How To Bring Sales To Your Business Through A Weblog

Article written by: Danny Wirken

An increasing number of business entities are actively using blogs as part of their marketing strategy. Why? Blogging is providing them the ability to connect with their audience thus encouraging goodwill which in turn helps bring sales.

Marketing through Blogging

It is nothing you have not heard for quite some time now. Blogging has caused quite a stir. It has, in fact, continued to proliferate rapidly. In early days, a blog is just a personal online diary. It is a place to publish one's thoughts, to collect and share things that one finds interesting. It is a venue to express one's rants, raves and musings. Today, professional and amateur journalists, political pundits, business honchos, entertainers, everybody seems to be blogging. Blogs are now being used to promote a business, run a political campaign, elicit publicity, among others.

A blog or weblog is an online diary of events arranged in reverse chronological order. The author of a blog is known as a blogger and writing or maintaining a blog is referred to as blogging. An individual entry or article is called a post and is available in the form of a blog page for the public to read. A blog may have a commentary box for readers to leave comments or opinions. These comments act as stimulus for further conversations. A business or corporate blog is simply a blog about a specific business. It is an effective medium for communicating with current and potential customers to share knowledge and expertise and foster relationships.

A company that employs a well-planned blogging strategy can spur significant market gains and sales earnings. Marketing is not just promoting a product or service. More importantly, it is about understanding the needs and wants of customers and developing products or services that satisfy these needs and wants effectively.

A blog enables a company to reach out to current and potential customers, in a more personal way. A blog builds connection and links between the company and its key audience which helps the company use this network over time to improve overall business. A business blog especially if regularly updated can inform readers about a company product or service, information, industry news, tips, tutorials or company developments. Links to industry-related stories can also be found in a blog. The way the targeted audience responds to these information or content is important to any company.

A blog is a good venue for customers to air issues, concerns and give comments. Through a blog, customers can give their own inputs. A company can hear directly from customers and understand what they desire to get from a product or service. Sometimes, the most well intentioned product under perform because of lack of customer feedback. With blogging, a company can ask for feedbacks, albeit not the whole world, but at least the blogging community. Once a company has insights into what a large community thinks of the product or service, the company can then further improve the product or service to meet customer requirements. After all, customer satisfaction is of utmost importance.

A company who listens and responds to customer feedbacks conveys the message that there is somebody who listens behind an otherwise faceless company. Because a blog is conversational, it gives the company a human voice.

This assures customers that there is a "real" person who will take care of their needs. Customers will feel an affinity with the company. Regular visits brought about by regular updates thru fresh blog entries will familiarize the customers with the company and make them feel that they personally know the company. In due time, trust and loyalty is built and relationships fostered. As we all know people generally buy products or avail the services of people they know and trust. Rest assure that return visits to the blog, maybe for more information will transpire even after a purchase has been made. As they say, customer loyalty is the end-all-be-all of marketing.

A company that utilizes customer ideas, feedbacks, and opinions can further satisfy customer needs and wants and thus facilitates goodwill in the blogging community. It is standard practice in blogging to provide a link to a thought originator which is important because backlinks are a method for search engines to rank a blog. Search engine ranking is very important. Google and Yahoo are two of the most popular search engines.

A blog is typically written daily thus the blog post is new. The search engines index the new post more often than the regular website. The result is a high rank compared to a website. If a company has a product to promote and publishes blog posts about the product regularly, chances are one of the blog posts will be found by readers who may be looking for information about the product. Hopefully, after reading the blog post, the potential customer will visit the company website and make a purchase online or buy the product in a "brick and mortar" store. Marketers acknowledge that potential customers can be customers once they find the information they want about a product from the company's blog.

Another feature of a blog why search engines love it is a blog's high number of incoming links. Bloggers link to other blogs, articles and websites. The reading audience is exposed to a plethora of information. Bloggers, thus, create and retain a loyal following of readers. PageRanks for blogs are usually very strong too. As you and I know, high search engine ranking translates to high traffic and more sales leads.

Generating Sales from Blogging

The way to get the most from blogging is by building a strong brand. A brand is simply value for the customer. It is good customer service and products or services that will satisfy customer needs and wants. A blog can help a company demonstrates its expertise in its industry or field. Blogs do create buzz about a company's authority in its niche. A blog connects a company to its target audience and peers and starts a more dynamic conversation with the marketplace. A blog helps to show a company's value, its online brand on the web. Once a company has built a strong brand, sales will just follow.

Publishing a blog will not automatically generate higher sales. However, it is an efficient way to communicate with customers and prospects. A blog in itself is an excellent tool to support a business, provide value, build relationships and establish brand and image. The ultimate purpose of a blog is to brand, to communicate and to connect. Increased sales should only be viewed as a positive indirect effect of a successful blog.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Corporate Blogging: Do's And Don'ts

Article written by: Danny Wirken

The blogging phenomenon has started to make companies view the potential benefits of corporate blogging. They all agree that blogs achieve a mass media effect through the high level of networking in the blogosphere wherein news disseminates very rapidly. The blogosphere (online community of blogs and their writings) has heralded a new communication tool that can
influence public opinion of a company. However, companies are slow to react to the growing credibility of corporate blogs as communication channels.

A recent list of Fortune 500 company blogs shows that only 5% of the United States' corporations have joined the blogging arena. Companies are treading this still unfamiliar territory with caution and skepticism. Company executives, public relations people and legal experts are just starting to figure out how they can utilize the potential of business blogs without subjecting themselves especially their companies to possible complications. Indeed, some companies are hesitant to plunge into the "scary" world of blogging for fear of encountering legal and business risks inherent in blogging such as libel, slander, lawsuits and disclosure of confidential and proprietary information.

Despite the fear, some industry leaders like Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and General Motors, to name a few, have dived headlong into corporate blogging. These companies recognize that a blog is an immensely effective yet low cost way to boost corporate communications and marketing objectives and at the same time connect with customers and prospects.

Basically, a blog (short for weblog) is published with easy to use software that enables a blogger (blog author) to create and update blog pages from which he can express his thoughts on a
particular subject. Written article on a blog is called a "post" and can be linked to other blogs, websites, news features, photo images and audio files. Links added to the text of blog posts allow blog content to be indexed and accessed by popular search engines such as Technorati and then disseminated in the web.

A corporate blog makes it easy for readers, be they customers or prospects, to find the latest and most accurate information about its new products and services. It can help achieve customer familiarity with the company products or services. Through the corporate blog, a company can converse directly with customers and prospects. Two-way communication creates trust and builds customer relationships. A corporate blog is the perfect choice for interacting with existing and potential clients. Corporate blogging serves as a channel for a company and its customers to meet on common ground and to know each other more. A corporate blog allows a company to closely track where and under what condition its products or services are being discussed online. Through the corporate blog, a company can keep an ear to the ground to hear what is being said about the company and speaking up when the situation calls for it. A more personal or understated benefit of a corporate blog is that it gives a human face to a perceived faceless and detached business entity. A corporate blog conjures images of people who are passionate about their products or services and are eager to engage customers and prospects.

It is a risky world out there and the blogosphere is no exception. For companies who are contemplating on setting out into the world of corporate blogging, it is in your best interests to have knowledge of some basic dos and don'ts of corporate blogging.

First on the agenda is do determine whether your company needs a corporate blog. A blog might be inappropriate for your company. Not all corporate cultures can tolerate the open, direct communication inherent to make a corporate blog successful. There are instances where blogs could not be reconciled with business practices and regulations. Clearly, there are risks to consider. Risks lie mainly in the content and the character or tone of comments which admittedly can only be censored to a limited degree.

If a corporate blog can fit your company culture, selecting the individual or employee who will write your blog is doubtless to say the most important decision. An ideal corporate blogger is one who is an expert in his field. He should also write with passion and sincerity. The object of your blog is to engage your customers and prospects in conversation and the most effective way to start a conversation is to be sincere and honest in your blog while writing about topics that are important to your company. He should have good writing skills. More importantly, he should be one who is respected by his peers and reacts calmly to outbursts. Blogging is an intense medium. The individuals who will blog for your company should be the ones who can keep their cool despite critical comments. Most likely, the ideal individual is not your CEO. Corporate speak won't thrive in the blogosphere.

In corporate blogging, goals/missions are of prime importance. For a blog to yield value, it has to be created with specific goals in mind. Some of these goals may be to increase company credibility, enhance customer service and interaction, and give customers a peek of the behind the-scenes "feel" of the corporate culture, showcase new products or services and more. The important thing is to be clear about your goals. You have to be sure about what you are trying to get done and stick to them. As with any corporate undertaking, you also need to periodically evaluate how well you are meeting these goals. If blogging is proving to be futile, then make changes. If it still does not work, then discontinue blogging.

Do take time to know your customers or prospects. Find out what your audience care about, what they are interested in. You have to identify what their needs are and what service you can perform for them. To get their attention, work out a way to participate in a conversation credibly. To be credible, come up with worthwhile content - ideas, insights, news and information. Content need not be long but should be interesting. Corporate blogs should not veer away from its chosen categories or topics. This is not to say you cannot be personal in your blog posts because you should, but the audience you are trying to connect with do not want to read through your blog if it is injected with a litany of personal rumblings.

Do engage your audience in lively and substantial conversations. Take into account what they say and reply to their comments. Respond in a professional and businesslike manner whether the comment is positive or negative. Allowing comments from your audience will definitely mean some complaints and criticisms. Don't take them personally. Respond honestly and your company credibility will rise. Allowing audience to make comments is a distinct characteristic of blogs. Openness is important for successful blogging. That said, use a feedback filter or comment moderation to monitor and control comments and delete comment spam (useless comments).

For a blog to accomplish its mission, do update regularly. Post frequently and consistently, daily or weekly, at least. Do be generous with your links. Linking is one reason why blogging has become a popular online communication medium. The best corporate blogs, more often than not, have lots of links in each blog post.

Do draw up a set of corporate blogging policies. Set limits on what information can be made public. Make clear what is allowed and what is not. Legal issues crop up in blogging. It is better to have some safety nets. In drafting blogging policies, it is advisable to do some research on it and publish proposed policies to get some feedback.

As for what not to do, do not close down existing employee blogs. More often than not, an employee is already writing a blog. It might be full of grievances about the recent spate of oil increases or it could be snapshots of a relaxing vacation in the Maldives. Maybe this employee is singing praises of the company's new product. Why not engage this employee blogger in
a dialogue about what your corporate blog aims to achieve. Don't wait for a crisis to break out before creating a corporate blog. It takes time to see potential results of blogging. Don't keep your corporate bloggers anonymous or hidden behind some make-believe characters. The audience will know and it will have detrimental effects.

Lastly, a blog is not a miracle cure. It will not single-handedly turn your distressed company around. Corporate blogging should be incorporated with other marketing and communication tools to achieve desired results.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Podcasting Search Engines - The Good And The Not So Good

By: Danny Wirken

It is much easier for search engines to index text blogs than podcasts or videoblogs. At present, search engines are using link text and the text surrounding the links to podcasts and videoblogs as a means to index their contents. The situation is admittedly a far cry from the ideal but the great strides being seen in the development of technologies towards the indexing of these mediacasts are very encouraging.

Podcasting in Relation to Search Engines

Podcasting is the method of distributing multi-media files over the Internet using either the RSS or atom-syndication formats, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. This may include, but is not limited to, audio programs and music videos. Podcast can mean both the content and method of delivery while a podcaster is the host or author of a podcast.

The websites of podcasters may offer direct download or streaming of their files. A podcast usually features a single type of show with new episodes introduced regularly or sporadically, although there are podcast networks that feature multiple shows on the same feed. It can be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading RSS or atom feeds.

The term podcasting is technically a misnomer as it combines two words: iPod and broadcasting. It does not require an iPod or over-the-air broadcasting. The "pod" name association stemmed from the popularity of the iPod digital audio player during the time that podcasting began. A lot of other terms have been suggested for use but the term stuck and remained as such.

Like any other regular websites that aim to be found by searchers, search engines have much to contribute towards this end including podcasts. Podcast optimization can be achieved by promoting only one feed. Many podcasters commit the mistake of creating a podcast and then moving over to a different management system which entails promoting a new RSS feed. This usually results to a lot of different feeds for every podcast which may be disadvantageous in the long run.

Another way to get the most out of podcasts is by optimizing the audio file. The findability gap should be closed since a lot of people listen to a podcast on their computers as well as their MP3 players. A landing page can be optimized for each episode of the show as well as the category page. Subscription information that is very visible on the landing page is highly recommended.

Podcasters should also look into building correct and valid feeds with feed validation tools. Since iTunes do not redistribute, a separate feed must be built for it. Doing three separate feeds - a 2.0 feed, a media feed and an iTunes feed is ideal.

The inclusion of a transcript or summary depending on the podcast's time span is needed. A landing page usually requires just a summary which is a well optimized page covering the podcast's high points. Some search engines use speech-recognition to determine the relevancy of the podcast.

Quality podcasts may not be easy to find. This is especially true if the desired site is one that has already done the lifting for its searchers including podcast search engines, directories and round up sites. A huge variety of podcasts are available in a wide variety of genres.

The Podcasting Search Engines

Generally, major search engines are not indexing podcasts in a format that is easy to find. However, some podcast-specific search engines seem to have solved some of the problems. Podscope searches for the spoken words within the podcasts themselves. Yahoo! Podcasts is very user friendly and is one of the more consistent and useful in finding good podcasts. Singing Fish provides a whole ream of results by just typing in podcast or bring back audio results only when specified with the use of drop-down menus on the top left. Other worthy research engines includes Podzinger, Blinkx, BlogDigger and Lycos Audio Search.

Aside from search engines, podcast directories are virtual goldmines for finding good podcasts. The Podcast http://www.alley.com/ includes the very useful Top Ten Podcasts of the Month as voted by listeners. The NPR Podcast Directory contains quality podcasts in a subject directory format. The http://www.podcast.net/ categorizes podcasts of various subjects by tags which are available for free download. Podcast Bunker is likewise one of the best places to find quality podcasts on the web.

Search engines have become very useful especially to those who don't particularly enjoy the search process. http://www.podzinger.com/ allows the user to search podcasts in the same way as searching for anything else in the web. A word or phrase typed in will find relevant broadcasts and highlights the segment of the audio in which they occurred. It is not perfect but it serves the user's need at this time. It works with a speech-recognition software which transforms audio into words. http://www.podscope.com/ and Blinkx are sites that work in a similar way.

Podzinger and Blinkx are search engines that scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching. This is a step ahead of traditional search engines that can only identify keywords in a podcast's Meta data such as the headline and introductory notes which describes the audio file's general content.

Podzinger has officially ended its beta and lets users jump to the spot in a podcast where their search term appears. This is a welcome option to being forced to scan an entire program for pertinent parts such as with Blinkx. The design results to an uncluttered search page similar to those of Google. Podcasters can also link to a searchable index of their content in order to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.

Both Podzinger and Blinkx include information about the source of the podcast as well as excerpts of text translated from the podcast. This comes with the added convenience of having relevant search terms highlighted. In this regard, Podzinger's information is more extensive while allowing users to hear excerpts and determine its relevancy before downloading the entire podcast.

Podscope searches podcasts but scans only for sounds of syllable rather than full words. It has operated a keyword search engine for video and radio broadcast since 1999. By far, the Blinkx service is a bit more extensive as it scours thousands of podcast and offers search for 1 million hours of TV news video and the content of academic lectures.

The problem at hand for podcast search is the difficulty in finding what is really needed in podcasts. Relevant results cannot be attained without words thus the heavy reliance on speech recognition software that would help the public search for on-line video and radio content. Podcasts are a priority at this time due to popularity boom it is currently experiencing. The aim is to make the spoken word as searchable as the printed word.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net/

How To Make Your Blog Marketing Budget Work

By: Danny Wirken

Maintaining a blog costs money. A blog owner has to contend with hosting service fees and other incremental expenses associated with publishing a blog. However, there are several techniques a blogger can employ to make his tight blog marketing budget work. Foremost of these ploys is implementing painstaking search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. SEO helps lessen the costs of marketing a blog.

Search Engine Optimization - Some Key Points

How do you get readers to visit your blog when you are competing with thousands of blogs around the blogosphere and the typical web surfer seldom reads beyond the first few results of a search query? This s the biggest challenge any blogger has to face. Search engine optimization is the answer. Search engine optimization is often described as the art and science of improving the rankings of one's blog within search engine results. SEO is the best way to drive traffic to your blog. Maximizing the benefits of a well-optimized blog will yield earnings that will greatly help to cover the costs of blogging.

There are certain things to remember when preparing to optimize your blog. Your blog has to be attractive not only to your visitors but to the search engine crawlers as well. If your blog gets a good ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP), it will mean better chances of getting visitors but it will be up to the blog to keep them there and hopefully encourages them to buy your product or avail of your service or whatever purpose the blog is for.

Optimizing a blog is similar to optimizing a website. But depending on the blogging tool you use, the results may vary. A blogging software is a specific type of content management system (software that provides a way for managing blogs). Blogging software such as WordPress and MovableType have rich sets of built-in optimization features that can make a blog more search engine friendly. A blogging software provides a web standard compliant interface that makes adding new blog posts and integrating them into the blog's navigational structure quite easy. After making sure that your blog software is set up in such a way that it takes full advantage of all the optimization features, keyword rich content comes next.

A blog that provides detailed information about its area of expertise will rank well in search engines for keywords contained in the content. Content may take the form of articles, news stories, guides and tips, industry trends and company developments, to name a few. To come up with the right keywords, always consider how you want your readers to find your blog post in search engines and what will they type if they want information on the topic you are writing. These will provide you with hints on what words will be repeated all throughout the article. Keywords can be used in the URL of a blog post and post title. URLs and title tags are good places for including your keywords since search engines are likely to give these areas more weight when indexing blog pages.

Content per post should be about one specific topic as the more focused the theme of a blog post the better when search engines come to rank it. Adding fresh new posts on a regular basis is highly recommended. The more you update, the more the search engine robots will index the blog posts. Choose catchy domain names for your blog that visitors will recall easily.

For the search engines to find you, submit your blog to them. Submit your blog URL to be included in the index. This might take time. A quicker way is to get linked by a blog already indexed by the search engines.

There are also certain external factors that affect a blog's search engine ranking. The most important of these factors are the inbound links. It is a widely accepted consensus that links pointing to your blog or posts make it for possible for your blog to rank higher in the search engine result pages. Every link to your blog is interpreted by the search engines as recognition bestowed on your blog. The best method to get these much sought after links is to post relevant content that visitors will want to read. After you publish a quality post on a subject you know will be of interest to another blogger, you may notify him through a short e-mail. If he does link, that will be additional traffic and subsequently helps build your own page rank in the search engines.

Another way to generate inbound links is to submit your blog on RSS feeds to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog. This is a very effective strategy. In fact, bloggers usually submit their new blogs to different directories. They submit links to important blog pages with relevant keywords in the links. There are quite a number of blog directories -http://www.DMOZ.org, Yahoo Directory and the Best of the Web Blog Directory. These are the more prominent ones. They offer free submissions.

Many blogs of the same nature exchange links with one another and form interlink networks. The bloggers enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and like-minded writers working together. Another way to generate quality inbound links is to swap links with other bloggers. Someone links to you so you link back. But in most cases links are formally arranged between bloggers. You can also generate inbound or backlinks to your blog by leaving legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs. You can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks. Trackback is a method of informing another blogger that you wrote a post related to what he had posted on his blog.

The above techniques will help your blog perform well and at the same time lessen the costs of marketing your blog. Search engine optimization is important but your readers come first. So, it all comes back to quality content. If you are publishing relevant content updated periodically, rest assure that great sites will more likely link to your blog. As a blog publisher, you definitely would like to be in good company.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

How Business Weblogs Really Affect The Marketplace

By: Danny Wirken

Over the years, the Internet has become a hub for people to discover and invent new ways to share relevant information in just a blink of an eye. A compelling worldwide conversation has begun. This conversation has become the new market. The members of this market communicate in a more open, natural honest, direct and at times authoritative way. They are talking, explaining, complaining, and sharing information in an unmistakably human voice.

As business continues to be increasingly connected, communication among these players in the new marketplace will prove to be vital. If the market talks about a company and its products, the concerned company should assess and understand all the information to better respond to such information. As information increases within the business world, proper distribution and management of this information should be a prime concern of the company. The blog is a very effective tool that allows a company to gain, to store and to disseminate information all at the same time. For a business to succeed, connectivity with the market and community are a must. A blog can accomplish this. The business weblog can affect the market place.

A blog or weblog is simply a journal posted on the Internet. It is updated regularly and may contain entries or posts on news, opinions, ideas plus links to other blogs, websites and sources of information. A blog has become a way to engage readers and prospective customers of businesses. They have emerged as a tool to boost business. Blogs invite readers to comment or post feedback on what they see around them. It can be about sports, entertainment, health, politics, economy, commerce to the most mundane of things like rants about school work. A blog can accomplish certain vital business goals. It can give much-needed exposure to new or little known product or service. Since many potential clients know a little only about a certain product or service, blogging is a good channel to lay out the specifics of the product or service. Readers are always hungry for information about companies and how to interact with them. Blogging can lead to more informed clients as it supplants the company as an information source.

Blogging allows a company to touch base with prospects. Any company that has exposure in the Internet is well aware that hits via the search engines especially the top three - Google, Yahoo and MSN can bring in sizeable leads. Blogs can add further leverage to the number of times with which search engines identify a company especially if the blog is updated regularly and allows readers to leave feedbacks. A well-executed blog can contribute positively to the ranking of a company's site within search engine results. A blog that allows comments, post new entries equate to additional blog pages to be crawled by the search engine robots.

Blogging is also an effective tool to establish a company as an expert in its industry or niche. Blogging sends positive buzz about the company credentials through the marketplace. It builds credibility and generates leads and inquiries. Blogging has evolved into a legitimate source of news that has greatly influence public opinion. Some blogs even hold much sway on the public as compared to larger and established media brands. Through a blog, a company can openly engage customers and peers in a discussion. This conversation transpires via reader comments. Comments or feedbacks allow a company to know what it is doing right and what needs to be improved. Customers and potential clients can be a company's mirror to determine whether its products or services are what the market wants to buy or avail of. In this regard, a blog affects the marketing scenario. A new trend in the marketplace has emerged - a customer-centric market.

The current competitive environment is a challenge for many businesses. The Internet and globalization have immensely affected how businesses conduct business. The marketplace has become a tough place for sellers. Customers and prospects have become more demanding. They want to be heard and have a say on the products and services that will satisfy their needs and wants. In today's marketplace, the prevailing credo is "love and hear thy customer". Customers, nowadays, expect that companies will always take them into consideration. If they have issues, companies should communicate that they understand what the issues are from the customers' points of view. Perception is very important thus companies should ask for feedbacks from customers and listen to gain insight or how to satisfy customer needs and wants.

Traditionally, a company develops a product or service and then work out a marketing plan. The marketing plan is crucial in applying company resources in the most cost-efficient way to sell to potential customers. The marketing plan usually includes the product, price, publicity or advertising and place or target area. This marketing approach is product-driven or company centric. A company makes a product and then find ways to get customers to buy the product.

The alternative to a product driven approach is the customer-centric approach. The latter focuses on the customers. The company first selects a particular group of customers. The company then does research on the proposed product or service. It is the customers who have the final say whether the particular product is what they want to buy. Only then will production commences.

A typical example is the La Fraise t-shirts. It all started with a French guy who passionately blogs about t-shirts. Through blogging, he built a community of loyal readers who share the same interest. He posted samples of t-shirt designs and the readers gladly send him feedbacks. This gave him an idea to put up a gallery of t-shirt designs. He encouraged his readers to vote on each design. The design that gets the highest vote goes into production and he sells them through his blog. What is nice is that the t-shirts are pre-sold already. He has no worries about inventory. It has become a full- fledged business. It is customer-centric. The customer decides which product to produce and then buys it. Credit should go to the guy because he is fully aware of the magic of comments - they can spur great ideas that can be converted to a business and one that works both ways for the customers and the business entrepreneur. This story perfectly shows how blogging can empower customers to be in the center in any business undertaking. Blogging truly affects the marketplace in more ways than one.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Wordpress And Content Management System: How To Make It Work

By: Danny Wirken

Since the release of WordPress, web users have customized this blogging software to suit their own needs. On of the most established needs in today's computing world is the need for content management, particularly, a Content Management System (CMS). With its rich set of features and flexibility, WordPress can be customized into a major CMS.

Content Management System

Content management can be described as the process of creating, managing and publishing online content sans any programming or technical skills. If used properly, content management saves time and money. An effective content management can be attained by utilizing a content management system.

A content management system is a web-based application connected to a database that allows users to update a website without having to know any HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, standard language with which all web pages are built). It is software used to manage websites and web content. A CMS facilitates the maintenance of content but not the design on a website.

Without CMS, updating a website say, posting a new article would involve manually changing the home page and archives and creating a new page from scratch for the article itself. Coupled with this, if a user wants other pages to link to the article like a list of current articles in the sidebar of pages, he has to change all these manually as well.

With CMS, a user just logs in and adds the article heading to a specific category. He then enters the content and ends by selecting some tags to describe the article. The CMS will automatically put the title, date and the first paragraph on the home page. He then constructs a new page for the article and adds the article to an archive by date and category.

As can be gleamed, CMS does away with inconvenient manual tasks and streamlines the updating process. A CMS manages content efficiently from the time of creation to publication. A content management system establishes a definitive approach to effectively publish, store and organize content for the users.

Content management systems offered by different vendors have varied benefits and functions that a user can select from according to his needs. A CMS can be expensive or absolutely free like WordPress. It really depends on how complex the site is and what needs to be done.

Most blogging software programs are considered a particular type of CMS. They have CMS features for creating and maintaining a blog. They make publishing on the Internet as easy as writing an article, giving it a title and setting it up under one or more categories. Basic blogging software provides an interface where a user can work in an intuitive manner while the blogging software handles the presentation and publication. A blogger gets to concentrate on writing and the blogging tool functioning as a content management system takes care of the rest of the site operation. WordPress is an example of blogging software.

WordPress - An Overview

WordPress is a well-structured personal publishing system written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, a popular open source server-side scripting language constructed specially for integration with HTML available in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) and backed by MySQL(open source Structured Query Language database implementation). WordPress is licensed under General Public License (GPL) and is available for free. WordPress started in 2001. Since then, it has grown to be the biggest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, utilized on a multitude of sites. WordPress focuses on ease of use, speed and a wonderful user experience. It is an open source program. Hundreds of people all over the globe are working on it. It offers a service in http://www.WordPress.com that lets a user get started with a free WordPress-based blog in seconds.

WordPress is an advanced blogging software program that provides a sophisticated set of features. Via its administration panels, a user can set options for the presentation of his blog and be published on the Internet instantly. WordPress focuses on aesthetics, web standards and usability.

WordPress as a Content Management System

A distinct characteristic of a CMS is that it singles out content from presentation. Content consists of text, images or other information shared in posts. This is separate from the structural design of a site which provides the foundation into which the content is inserted and the presentation of a site which involves graphic design. Content is stored in a database. A user can change the look of a site with a few changes to style sheets such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and other layout features that define the font styles and sizes, colors, backgrounds and positions. In like manner, WordPress stores content in a database and the WordPress Theme(layout/design) controls the look of how the content is displayed.

A CMS has control over what content shows up and where ads, related posts, comments and other interactive elements appear on a web page. But with the plug-ins and add-ons available in
WordPresss, a user can also add these features to his blog. A user can turn WordPress into a full-fledged CMS with the many options, customizations and controls accessible to him.

There are a number of options a user can use to make WordPress works like a CMS. Most CMS sites control what articles appear on the front page. In WordPress, a user can make use of the Semiologic Opt-in FrontPage Plug-in that lets him choose which post will appear on his front page. Podcasting, videoblogging, adding music and images are possible with WordPress. There are plenty of elements that a user can add to WordPress to enhance connectivity and functions. Signing up for mailing lists, newsletters and other information to be disseminated can be done with WordPress. A user can even set up e-commerce with WordPress. Adding ads to a WordPress site is as simple as placing the ad information into the proper template file. Forums and bulletin boards are integrated with WordPress. Every WordPress user has a role that determines his rights within the application. This is particularly useful to control the flow of certain content. Another valuable feature of WordPress is its built-in moderation feature. This allows the user to approve messages before they get posted. The WP-ShortStart Plug-in renders Statistic monitoring. Lastly, a user's CMS site won't be complete without a way to handle external and internal links. WordPress has a number of plug-ins that can be used for this purpose.

Simply put, WordPress has sophisticated features that make it a powerful content management system.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Yahoo! Beta Testing Blog Search Application Sites

By: Danny Wirken

In the recent past, a news story came out that Yahoo! has begun testing a blog search application in its Korean blog site. Yahoo!, a leading global Internet company offers a range of features making it a one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These features include Yahoo! Mail (a web-based e-mail service), Yahoo! Messenger (instant messaging client), online gaming, chat, news and information portals, online shopping and online auction facilities. Add to this array of features, the Blog Search. Yahoo! seems to be ready to challenge industry leader blog search site, Technorati.

The blog search technology is designed to let bloggers sign up to publish their weblogs. The technology boasts of various search tools that will enable blog visitors to retrieve content and images within weblogs, latest blog postings or pages marked as favorites.

Blogs are currently the rage in the Internet. Anybody with an Internet connection can publish a blog for the worldwide audience to see. At the beginning of 1999, there were only an estimated two or three dozen blogs in existence. As of July 2006, Technorati counted more than 50 million and still growing. In fact, 75 000 new blogs are created everyday.

A blog, short for weblog, is an interactive, personalized web journal for posting articles or anything one wants to share with the general public or a select few. Articles or posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, that is, recent addition is at the top of the page. A blog is updated regularly and contains links to other articles (posts), blogs or websites. Posting comments is another feature. Many blogs focus on a specific topic such as politics, sports, technology, health, news, etc. Others are more like personal diaries detailing the author's (blogger) rants, raves and musings.

Because of the rapid growth of blogs, keeping on top of them is quite challenging. Industry players like Yahoo! is well aware of the increasing power of blogs and their ability to provide a wealth of information online. Yet, there are only a few blog-specific search tools to go through all the information in real time.

Two months after Yahoo! began testing the blog search feature on its Korean blog site; it has finally unveiled its blog search tool. The launch came at a time when the United States was still reeling from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. During that time, millions of people logged in to Yahoo! News for in-depth and accurate information. Simultaneously, bloggers were posting first-hand accounts, pictures, opinions, personal experiences. But due to lack of mainstream exposure, much relevant information was not disseminated. This further highlights the role that a blog search tool can play - a channel to bring information to the public in the shortest time possible.

Instead of launching a stand alone feature, Yahoo! has integrated blogs in Yahoo! News Search. When a user conducts a search in Yahoo! News, blog results as well as news from trusted news sites will be displayed simultaneously. Yahoo! acknowledges that the opinions, stories and experiences published on blogs make a great complement to mainstream news people read everyday. Blogs have proven to be an effective medium for anyone who wants to be heard in the public forum. A lot of times bloggers have even beaten mainstream media to newsworthy stories.

Traditional media recognize that they do not have the time and resources to cover all the events and happenings in the world. By incorporating the blog search into Yahoo! News, Yahoo! desires to offer an alternative perspective on news aside from what mainstream media can offer. Yahoo! wishes to bring professional journalism and amateur or citizen journalism together to provide the users with a wider array of information. Yahoo assures the users and the general public as well that there will be enough distinction where the information is coming from.

Yahoo! aims to learn from users and publishers. The expanded news search gives users more chances to find relevant information that matters to them from leading news stories, commentaries, citizen first-hand reports, pictures and images that mainstream media may not have covered. It will be to the utmost benefit of the millions of people who wants to be informed of what is going on around the world if Yahoo! News can bring mainstream and personal or grassroots media together. The people are then assured of greater variety of sources and viewpoints from all corners of the world.

When a user conducts a search on Yahoo! News, results from mainstream media partners of Yahoo! will be displayed on the left side of the page. On the right side, in a side-bar type area will be relevant blog search results. When the user clicks on "all blog results", the user will receive Flickr (Yahoo!'s photo sharing service) photo thumbnails related to his search on the right hand side of the search results page. By integrating global grassroots media into the News Search results, users can enjoy analysis or opinions thru blogs but also related photos from the Flickr community that will provide a visual context to content as reported by the citizens. In addition, My Web links will also be displayed on the right hand side of the search results page together with Flickr. My Web is Yahoo!'s social search engine that utilizes the combined knowledge of the My Web community. My Web provides important links to information related to the user's search topic.

As to which search results to display in its blog column, Yahoo! does not give specifics but suffice it to say that blog search results are based in part on the popularity of the blogs within My Yahoo!, as measured by a computer algorithm. At first, only blogs registered with the My Yahoo! RSS directory will be included in the search but will eventually scan the millions of blogs outside the My Yahoo! sphere.

Yahoo!'s Blog Search will complement Yahoo! 360, its social networking and blog publishing service and Yahoo!'s recently launched advertising service for small publishers.

Whether you are looking for political commentary on the Israeli air strikes in Lebanon, Superman movie reviews, iMac G5 specs, sumptuous Vietnamese recipes, Louis Vuitton's latest bag collection, or anything else, Yahoo! Blog Search will help you find out what people are saying on these subjects of your choice.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

SEO For Your Site Utilizing A Blog Effectively

By: George Christdodolou

Many people use Blogs as a way to advertise there site. Blogs are a great way to get links to your site as well as creating great easy to upload content that is seen by both people and search engines. So what steps can you take to make sure that you are keeping that blog up to date and including all your major key words?

The task of creating a blog that is easy to keep up and that effectively works to increase your sites standings with search engines can be very time consuming and difficult.

The most important aspect of the blog is the amount of posts you are writing. Make sure that you are not writing too often because you might be looked at as a spammer if you are using blogger or wordpress and they might close your account. To make sure that you are not spamming, just choose a time or 2 every day that you can choose to write in your blog. If you write in at a regular basis, you will have an advantage with search engines since they check sites at a regular basis.

Key words are another important part of writing in a blog. This is important because you can make the search engines think that your site is related to those key words. This is important because everyone knows that having your keywords in the articles that you write change your standings with search engines.

The next step is to make sure that you are pinging your blog. This is important for getting your site in front of peoples faces. It also allows your blog to be seen by search engines. The more links to your site the better. This is a major advantage if your blog is going to be on your site. It optimized the blog and allows people to see it in search engines increasing traffic to the blog. From your blog, visitors will then click on the link to the rest of the site.

Search engines can see how people move around your site and where your traffic is coming from when they consider your site.

There is a lot of work that has to do with blogs and I hope you are up to the task.

About The Author:

If You Are Having Trouble With SEO Or you Do Not Have The Time, Please Consider Our
http://internetbusiness-tips.com, And Our Blogging Service Which Are Both Part of One Service That Uses Tactics That Will Astound You.

RSS Integration: Personalized Online Marketing

By: Scott Lindsay

As with most online marketing strategies there is a link between the various facets of marketing. For example there is a compatibility link between a business blog (b-blog) and a forum board. There is also a link between a b-blog and a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.

Allow customers to decide what is most important.

By using an RSS feed in conjunction with your b-blog you are extending a courtesy to your valued customers. They can choose to be 'fed' blog entries that are compatible with their personal interests. Don't be surprised if they visit at times other than an RSS prompt.

This concept can also be implemented with a content-rich website where new articles are being added on a regular basis. These new articles are a draw to those who access an RSS feed because it allows a hands-free feed of desired information from sources they trust.

An RSS feed allows you the opportunity to become a trusted source for information.

Integrated technology in marketing

Online marketing is the next logical step for brick and mortar stores. Whether you have a store front or find yourself exclusively web-based you can take advantage of available technologies allowing you to maximize the impact you have on prospects and existing customers.

The prospect of merging existing technologies into a comprehensive online marketing plan can be a little disconcerting if you aren't really sure how these technologies work or how they perform together.

By spending some time in research or by outsourcing some of the design features that allow the integration to take place you are laying the groundwork that will positively impacting the future productivity of your online business.

Many blogging sites allow the implementation of site RSS at no extra costs to their customers while web browsers like Firefox already have a built in RSS reader that allows the end-user easy access the information they are most interested in.

As your website and/or blog grows you will find more and more people accessing the RSS feature. This is a great tool that provides a motivated list of contacts. Every time you post a new article on your website or post something on your blog the information is quickly directed to the parties most interested.

RSS simply offers another consumer tool that permits your clients to be in control of the information they receive, your job is to provide quality information and quietly allow it to connect with a receptive audience.

About The Author:

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with http://HighPowerSites.com at:
http://www.highpowersites.com

Ideas For Online Advertising And Blogs

By:Danny Wirken

Nowadays, a lot of people are clicking into the Internet daily. A good number of this activity has a lot to do with online advertising and blogs. The actual effect of online advertising and blogging can be gauged by the continuously increasing number of participants whether as individuals or organizations.

Traditional and Online Advertising

As compared to a traditional advertising, online ads produce quick results at low cost. Business entrepreneurs going into online advertising aim to attract more visitors to their websites. Once the desired traffic is established, follow-up is necessary to convert these viewers into customers or buyers.

Through the follow-up promotional technique, people tend to buy more even if it was not the original intention of the customer. People who have purchased once will buy again if a timely follow-up is made. When a person trusts a particular product or service, he/she continues to buy primarily due to the satisfaction they get. Follow-up and follow through is very important. It is a good practice in sales to get a customer to ensure that they are happy and contented with their purchase. This can also be an opportune time to present the customer with a follow-up offer but selling should only be secondary to customer service inquiry.

There are several online advertising methods and strategies which can be used to generate more visitors, subscribers and buyers into a website.

An Affiliate Program or Associate Program can be used to get interested visitors to go into a site while having other people do the legwork. This means that other people will do the job of promoting the products and services. The program starts when affiliates send visitors to a site with the use of text referrals, logos, banner ads or anything used for promotion. These visitors are then traced and tallied in a special software. Once these visitors turn into buyers, the affiliate is paid a commission. This is a sure win since affiliates are paid only for sales made. There is absolutely no risk because payment is made only when interested customers actually buy the product or service. There is no cash out unless there is actual cash received from the sale of product or service. What is important here however is that affiliates should be well paid for their efforts since unattractive incentives will fail to provide the needed motivation. Additional incentives, such as rewards or bonuses will do the business good and will surely increase sales.

The Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy is the powerful and fastest way to bring targeted traffic into a website. With this PPC method, it is easy to attract visitors who are interested with the products and services through the use of the proper keywords. As the name implies, payment of premium is made every time a visitor clicks in a link. This strategy if correctly done is very profitable. However, lots of money can be lost if not used properly and carefully. Many people believe that the only way to develop a successful pay per click ad is to get to the number one position. However, being number one does not necessarily mean being the best. There is no wisdom in being ranked number one if it will translate to more expenses. To be successful with PPC engines, bids should be kept as low as possible.

Advertisers cannot afford to waste money on ineffective buys. When ad response is very low, there is a need to concentrate on improving the creative of the ad. Before choosing any advertising idea, goals must be defined and clear objectives stated. Identification of sites relevant to any product or service is required to get started. Effective sites are those which appeal to target customers and users. Messages need to be able to go through. They should be easily understood especially by the target audience. Promotional messages must be strong and specific and rich media may be used to expand it. This could add more depth to the creative and expand the capacity of responses. Another way is to design ads as if it belongs to the site where advertising is placed. Multiple versions of ads can be created by as much as 3 to 4 versions. This can be achieved by changing the promotional message, color schemes or text fonts. Do not be afraid to experiment as adjustments on the ads based on initial reactions can still be made. There should be no room in settling for poor responses as ads should be made to work.

Online entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for effective and affordable online advertising tools. In the process of searching for the right advertising tool, so much time, money and effort are devoted. These online advertising tools can create and generate vast number of traffics, but if visitors are not converted into buyers, the time, money and effort are all wasted. It is therefore very important that adequate attention be given to online ads that will convert viewers into paying customers. The most vital tool to track performance is the sales report copy. The percentage of buyers over the total number of visitors will determine whether or not a business is doing well. If the percentage of conversion is not good then sales technologies and strategies should be improved.

Some website operators erroneously use the traditional brick and mortar advertising technique in developing their sales copy. This causes sales copy to be ineffective as an online advertising tool. Traditional advertising is designed to get shoppers into a retail store where the sales person would take up the selling process. This is not true for Internet ads. Ads attract visitors but there would be no sales personnel to meet them as in brick and mortar stores. The sales copy is the sales person. In this case, the sales report is not only an advertising tool but also an online sales tool. Actual advertisements should include website page titles and descriptions. The rest of the copywriting should be sales oriented. Without a website copy acting as a sales tool, the use of the best online advertising tools on the net to attract traffic will be fruitless.

Blogs and Advertising

Increasing the readership of blogs take time, patience and hard work. Blogs that have good quality content as well as interesting and original, are those which attracts more readers. A good blog design is of vital importance if a blog is to create a good first impression. With several blogs and sites around, a good weblog lay-out counts. It is also necessary to link to other blogs and interact with readers. Having interaction with others invites involvement with readers and produce repeat visitors. Active participation in web forums and discussion pages may allow for addition of a signature to the post and raise the profile in the process.

Position is a key element in successful advertising. A billboard positioned along a busy intersection will not produce the same result as a billboard in a road where no one drives. The design and position of ads is likewise relevant. If they are out of sight they will never get clicked on. All business bloggers aim to have their site found to initiate what would hopefully be a continuous business relationship.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Sphere - About The New Blog Search Engine

By Danny Wirken

Searchers would never say no to something that would make their work a lot easier. With the coming of Sphere - the latest blog search engine, it promises to help users discover high-quality, relevant and timely blog posts with the use of its advanced search algorithm. It aims to deliver results far better than other existing blog search services.

The People behind Sphere

Sphere was founded by Tony Conrad, Martin Remy, Steve Nieker and Toni Schneider to assist readers in their discovery of relevant blog content as well as encourage more people to read blogs or be bloggers themselves. Investors who helped Sphere get started include Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winston, Phil Black, Vince Vanelli and Will Hearst. Its partners and capitalists, on the other hand include Darcy Bentley of Hearst Publishing and Venetia Kontogouris of Trident Capital.

This blog search engine had a very successful first private beta release in late 2005. Its success can be attributed to Martin Remy and Steve Nieker who have worked on blog and content matching technology for a long time. It also has for its advisors the likes of Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automatic/WordPress and a blog content tool leader; Mary Hodder, founder/CEO of Dabble and a blog user experience expert; and Scott Kurnit, founder and former CEO of http://www.About.com who was instrumental in creating a work community there.

The feedback gained from the well received private beta was used to add some advanced and intuitive features. Sphere is based in San Francisco but members of the team work virtually from other places like Seattle, Denver, Vancouver, New York, Phoenix and the Bay Area. It highly recommends its own Sphere Blog for information regarding ongoing updates.

Tony Conrad was a general partner at VSP prior to founding Sphere. This was where he led consumer-tech and marketing software and services investments. He has also served as a director for Oddpost, Iconoculture, MusicNow and Centive. He has likewise been very active in managing investments in Post Communications and Stonyfield Farms. At present, he serves on the Board of Directors for Automatic/WordPress.

Martin Remy and Steve Nieker have worked together for a long time and are both considered technologists extraordinaire. They were together when they founded Think Tank 23 during the so called dot-com boom. It was able to survive largely because they were able to build a lot of great technology and sold a few software projects to big publishing companies in spite of being funded by venture capitalists. They have extensive roots in information retrieval that goes back to the end of the last century. Their NAV 4 which is a document-analysis genome that drove precise information retrieval across broad networks without onerous manual overhead is baked into Sphere. This has provided many benefits including the base technology driving the related news stories links.

Toni Schneider worked at Yahoo! and at Oddpost which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo He created the Yahoo! Developer Network. He comes from Switzerland and only came to California to study Computer Science for a year. At present, he is happily based in San Francisco while serving as the CEO of Automatic and a venture partner at True Ventures. He remains an adviser to Sphere.

The Relevant Blog Search

Sphere is being touted as a search engine that has made blog search much better. Its interface is designed by Adaptive Path and comes out quite clean and understandable. One of its more notable features is the profile link that produces a small DHTML overlay with some vital stats for each blog such as average posting frequency, posts per week and blogs recently linked to among others. Its technology is believed to be more resistant to spam blogs than other search engines. It doesn't actually filter out such spam blogs but is able to rank them so low that readers rarely encounter them.

The right combination of factors that produces a more robust ranking technology of blogs and posts is the reason why Sphere seems to work better than other blog search. It pays attention to the ecology of relationships between blogs and credits a higher weighted value to links that have more authority. This will ensure that the work of an author who goes off-topic and engages in rant will rank considerably lower compared to that written by a reputable blogger who regularly writes about the topic.

The metadata about a blog is also considered by Sphere. It would look into the frequency of postings, the length of the posts and the average links a post gets. Sphere will not rank blogs well if they are not part of a larger ecosystem of linking.

The system has made it possible to have spams fall at the bottom of the ranking. It also gives ways to filter results either by date, relevance or by language. A new version of the services has some neat interface hacks along the lines of a time axis.

Blogs are definitely big, with millions of existing blogs multiplying by the second, relevant information can be very hard to find. Sphere helps readers to find relevant and intelligent blog posts on a specific topic based on authority. It should be noted that the authority being mentioned here is not an arbitrary decision of a human community but rather a collective effort.

Searching the Sphere is very easy. The user needs to enter some keywords and the system shows related posts, blogs, profiles, related news, photos, books and podcasts. It sorts the results by relevance or time and refines the date range with dropdowns right on the results page. It also supports quotes for phrase searching, Boolean operators and minus for exclusions.

The entry of multiple words or phrases in a query finds posts that match all these words and phrases. A query comprised of two words will find posts that contain both words. Posts that contain the words together usually turn up first while posts that contain the words separately and in different places will show up much later. If the search is to be limited to an exact phrase, only results that mention the words together are obtained. For finding posts that match either of the words, the OR operator can be used.

Excluding posts can be done by putting a minus before a term or phrase. Parenthesis is used to group terms and expressions together. A search can also be confined to the blog's domain.

Sphere has taken a new approach to blog search as it uses variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. It attempts to understand
link structures. In the process of analyzing these structures, it attempts to understand who is starting or linking discussions instead of bloggers who simply comment on conversations.

About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net

Blogs: The Hidden Ace Up Your Sleeve

By Van Whitsett

If it wasn't for my blog, I wouldn't make any online sales at all.

It's true that I have a "regular" website, my so-called "main website," which I first set up to sell my goods, in this case, men's and women's health products. It's my workhorse, the source of most of my revenue. Most of my sales resulted from generic listings in the search engines, particually Google.

That is, until Google sandboxed me.

Some of you may have heard of the legendary Google sandbox, sometimes called, "The Goggle Sandbox Effect." What happens is that newly listed sites rank well for about two to three weeks, then suddenly drop off the radar screen. These new sites are placed in a type of probational sandbox, away from the "real" sites.

Why does this happen, you ask? There are almost as many theories as there are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts. Many believe that this probation period is not related to the sites themselves, but to their links. It is believed that back link (pure link popularity) credit is placed in a reserve for a period of time (2-4 months) before it is applied to ranking and has an effect. The theory behind this is to combat PR (Page Rank) purchasers from dominating PR from the beginning. It is meant to deter spam websites.

Others believe this alleged filter that is placed on new websites is an illusion. These skeptics argue that the phenomenon merely echoes already existing Google algorithm calculations.

Whatever the reason, I got sandboxed, the rug pulled out from underneath me; shiskobobbed. The high-ranking and sales that I was receiving from my site suddenly plummented.

I was devastated. What's a poor boy to do now?

Desperate, I wrote to a number of online SEO forums, seeking advice from the SEO gurus. Some thought it was amusing and laughed in my face. Others offered advice such as forgetting about Google for awhile and optimizing my site for the other search engines (not a bad idea). Others thought that I should continue adding content, since content is king as far as the search engines are concerned. Still others thought I should try to gain as many quality links as I should and this would help pull me out of the sandbox (it felt more like quicksand to me.)

I committed to doing all these things, but in the meaintime, what about my website and the products that I was trying to sell, the money I was hoping to make?

I kept hearing about blogs, those personal websites that are published on the Web. As you probably know, blogs contain philosophical reflections, talk about social issues, and opinions about everything under the sun. They are usually presented in journal style with a new entry each day, or almost every day.

Some people have found out that blogs can also be used to sell products. In fact, an entire industry has evolved around commerical blogging and ways to market them. Some of these commerical blogs appear in the same journal style as the most popular blogs, while others do not look any different from a regular commerical website.

At any rate, I decided to check them out. The fact that a number of blog publishers allow you to build and post your comments for free, certainly didn't hurt either.

I studied many of the blogs that are out there on the Internet, particually the ones relating to my niche. The more I read, the more I liked. I was surprised to learn that some of the top websites in my niche were actually blogs. They ranked high on Google and all of the other search engines. And no doupt, they were making sales.

Soon, I had a pretty good idea about how I was going to build my blog. I didn't want to copy the others, I just needed to get an idea of how some enterprising webmasters were creating them.

Within minutes, I had created my blog, published it on the Web, and began posting and tweaking it. I inserted some HTML code to monitor my stats, and continued to work on making it a better blog. I also continued to work on my other websites, so that whenever I do climb out of Google's sandbox, my site will get a good rating.

Not long afterwards, I made my first blog sale!

Elated, I built other blogs. The more lines you have in the water, the better chance you'll catch a fish, right? Each was slightly different than the preceeding one, but I still hawked the same
products. All have links back to my "main" website, and all have brought me sales.

I might have been down, but thanks to my new-found knowledge about blogs, I wasn't out.

So, while I'm waiting to climb out of Google's sandbox, I have an ace in the hole and another up my sleeve that is continuing to make sales for me - my blog. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon one of the best ways to get my products out there before the buying public.

What I had thought was the worse thing to happen turned out to be the best thing. Had Google not sandboxed me, I probably never would have discovered the awesome marketing power of blogs!

About the Author:

Van Whitsett is the author of numerous articles, both online and in the print media. He has tried (and failed) with a number of Internet businesses until he hit the jackpot as an affiliate for http://mensniche.com/wmreg/hit.php?w=102811 Mensniche. His website, Natural Male Enhancement has proven to him that the Holy Grail does indeed exist and that it's possible to earn money online.

Choosing The Blog Software That's Right For You

By Angie Noack

If you've been hearing all the buzz about blogging and want to
know what it is and how to get started, this article is for
you. Here we will discuss what blogging is, what blog software
you'll need, and what you can do with it.

What's a blog?

A weblog - blog for short - is a type of website. Blogs are
unique from other static website in that they are usually
updated often. The main page of the site usually contains the
most recent post or posts of the author or authors of the
website. Also, blogs often also allow readers to post their
comments directly to the site.

All of the factors work together to make blogs a very popular
form of website creation, and online community building. If
you'd like to try your hand at blogging, here's how to get
started.

First, decided on the topic of your blog. Maybe you want to
keep a diary of your daily life for your friends and family. If
there's a topic that you are interested in, say, politics for
example, blogs are a great way to discuss and share your
interests and comments on current topics related to your
interests.

Once you've decided on the topic of your blog, you'll want to
choose a blog software program. The great thing is, some of the
best programs and blog services are free!

Many blogging services are based online, such as blogger.com.
Just visit these sites and register with them - many will give
you free webspace and allow you to start blogging immediately.

If you want to register your own domain name and run your blog
on your own server, you will need to install server side blog
software. Not to fear, many webhosts come with an automatic
installer called fantastico that will make getting your site up
and running quick and easy.

Some of the more popular free blogging software programs are
Wordpress and B2Evolution. Doing a search for any of these will
get you the free downloads if they are not available through
your webhost.

Blogs can be useful for building many types of websites.
Examples include, corporate sights for keeping employees and
customers up-to-date, travel diaries, niche websites on
specific topics, interactive community websites, and more. The
ease of posting and editing your blog website online makes blog
software useful for many purposes.

About The Author:

Angie Noack is a business strategist with a
sharp edge for technology. With her unique ability to combine
these two skills, she's able to help businesses save time and
increase profits. You can find her online at
http://www.liquidblogging.com/blogs.php.

How To Use a Podcast For Internet Marketing

By Michael Murray

Although podcasting is trendy, it's vital to remember that when you use a podcast for Internet marketing, your podcast is really just another delivery mechanism - a way to get your marketing message across.

Because it is a new delivery mechanism, there's a chance you'll get so wrapped in the technology that you'll forget the basics, the AIDA formula. You need to give people something that they want to listen to, and you can't go wrong with the AIDA formula. AIDA is used in copywriting, and is an acronym: AIDA means Attract/ Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

You need to get people's attention, arouse their interest in your product, get them to want it, and finally take action to buy it.

Using AIDA In Your Podcasts

You can use the AIDA formula to market your products via podcasts in several ways.

Firstly, you can use the podcast to attract people to a Web site where you're selling products related to the podcast theme. The podcast is the attention-getter. You can have ads on your site selling your products, and include mention of them in the podcast too.

Next, include valuable information or entertainment in your podcasts to make sure that people subscribe. When they subscribe, you can market to them over and over again. This is the Interest factor.

You arouse Desire by mentioning your products and their benefits in your podcasts.

Finally, you need a call to Action, to ensure that people take action. "Buy before midnight on Thursday, and receive
_________"

Making Your First Podcast

Making a podcast (it's really just making an MP3 file) couldn't be simpler. Here are the steps:

1. Plug a microphone into your computer;
2. Record your podcast using a program like Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ (it's free);
3. Create an RSS feed - more information on that here http://www.ipodder.org/whatIsPodcasting (don't let the technical jargon make you nervous, the RSS Feed is just a reference enclosure that lets listeners know when you've put a new podcast online);
4. Upload the podcast to your Web site, and then upload the podcast's RSS Feed to a destination like Podcast Alley at http://www.podcastalley.com/ so that you can start getting a mass of happy subscribers.

Get Interviewed On a Podcast

If you don't want to make your own podcasts, offer yourself as an interviewee on other people's podcasts. This saves you the trouble of recording your own material and putting it online, and you can promote your products on someone else's show as easily as you can on your own.

When you create your own podcasts, you'll want to ask people to join you for an interview too. You can even ask people to send you MP3 files of questions or tips, that you can include in your podcast.

So there you have it: podcasting, another tool to add to your Internet marketing toolbox. If the idea appeals, give podcasting a try.

About the Author:

Michael Murray is a 22-year old full-time Internet marketer and college student with Cerebral Palsy who lives in sunny Orlando Florida. Need MORE TRAFFIC to your website or
affiliate links? "Turn Words Into Traffic" reveals the secrets for driving thousands of NEW visitors to your website or affiliate links... without spending a dime on advertising!: http://www.marketlikeapro.com/words.html

Can YOU Really Make Money From Blogging?

By Willie Crawford

One of the questions I see frequently asked on online discussion forums is, "Can You Really Make Money From Blogging?" People want to know if there's some way to profit from the time they spend maintaining their weblogs or personal online journals.

My answer is an emphatic "YES," because I do it... everyday!

Today I'll share with you how I do it.

Let me begin by saying that I don't make thousands per month from MOST of my blogs. However, I do have many making hundreds. Since I don't put in a lot of time maintaining them, and I enjoy blogging, I consider the money a bonus. I blog while sitting in my yard with my laptop (on a wireless connection)... watching the clouds roll by.

Another bonus I get from blogging is that it helps my regular websites that are set up as my "money machines."

The search engines visit my blogs more often than they visit my regular sites, and they follow the links from my blogs pointing to other sites. Some of these links point to my sites, and some point to sites of partners. This does help the search engine rankings of these sites MASSIVELY.

How Do I Monetize My Blogs?

I monetize my blogs by creating blogs on topics people are searching for... and that they are spending money on. I know which niches are hot to an extent based upon what my research proves pay-per-click advertisers are willing to spend their advertising dollars on.

I run Google AdSense ads on my blogs. I simply insert these ads in my menu bar and other strategic places on the webpage. I also experiment with other paid advertising on my blogs.

I sell affiliate products from my blogs. I simply find affiliate products at places like PayDotCom.com and Commission Junction. I incorporate these into my blogs. I do things like product reviews, how-to articles, etc. You can also locate suitable affiliate products by typing your target keywords + "affiliate program" at any major search engine. This should point out
numerous websites with suitable affiliate programs to you.

How Do I Setup/Host My Blogs?

I have blog hosted on some of my own domains using Moveable Type. This is just one of many great pieces of blogging software. You have other choices... my programmer recommended this one to me. I also have blogs hosted for free on Blogger.com. I have them on Blogger.com because they are incredibly easy to set up and maintain. A secondary reason I have them on Blogger.com is that Google OWNS Blogger.com and they index webpages hosted on their servers OFTEN and FAST!

The secret to getting Google and Yahoo! to visit your blogs often is a technique called "blogging and pinging." It's a method of notifying all of the major search engines, and blog directories, each time that you update your blog. The search engines come to take a look and they follow links from your blog to spider other blogs/sites. It's very powerful.

I won't go into too much details on blogging and pinging here. If you want more information on that topic I invite you to drop by my free, Internet marketing discussion board and ask any and all questions! It's at: http://WillieCrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Examples Of Profitable Blogs?

I know, you want to see examples of profitable blogs :-)

To show you how simple it can be I'll show you just ONE. It's less than 2 months old :-)

The problem is that as soon as I show a site to anyone as an example, it's instantly ripped off. So, I'm going to "sacrifice" one making me about $60 per day from affiliate product sales and
about $20 per day in AdSense revenue. That site is at: http://cure-nail-fungus.blogspot.com The above site currently ranks Number 6 on Yahoo for the term "cure nail fungus." It's a small niche but one that makes me $2400 per month... just from that one blog.

If you searched on the same term at Google, this site is not very highly ranked. However, THIS page is Num ber4: http://www.chitterlings.com/no-more-nail-fungus.html. That happens to be one of my pages too :-) I won't tell you what ALL I'm up to on that page... that's another article. The technique involves using your own domains to promote affiliate products rather than advertising someone else's domain... so it improves your link popularity.

I'm not going to show more of my blogs because that just invites competition. Instead, I'm going to answer another question you have to be wondering...

"How do I find time to maintain all of these blogs, even if they are profitable?"

Well, first of all, I don't really need a lot like the "sacrificial lamb" that I showed you above to keep me satisfied.

I do have a number of secret weapons though. One is called AutoBlogger. You can check it out at: http://WillieCrawford.com/auto-blogger.html

What AutoBlogger does is allow me to queue up a number of posts for my various blogs in advance. It lets you queue up "articles" which can really be anything you want. Then you tell the software at what frequency to make a post.

My AutoBlogger account allows me to automatically post to an UNLIMITED number of blogs.

WARNING: A program like AutoBlogger can get you in trouble if you misuse it! If you use it to spam or abuse the search engines, it's just going to get you banned. If you use it to abuse the
blog hosts, they're just going to delete your blogs.

Here's how I use AutoBlogger:

I have sites where I discuss Internet marketing... as just one example. On these sites I share many of my articles and tidbits. I simply queue up these articles/tidbits to post at a given frequency. This frequency can be a set number of hours, days, weeks, or months. So theoretically, I can set up a blog, pre-schedule 50 posts, and not touch it in months, while it is
automatically posted to for the next 50 intervals.

AutoBlogger even lets you set it to start rotating through the posts again when they run out, if you want to. I personally wouldn't do this since you'd just be posting duplicate content.

AutoBlogger allows you to insert RSS feeds right into your blog posts. So in addition to posting articles you can also auto-update by adding new RSS feeds at a set interval. Since I HATE
sending my traffic to other sites (without reciprocation), these RSS feeds generally pull from MY sites. That way, my traffic is only sent to my other sites.

If you don't even feel like queuing up a lot of posts, you can go to a site like Elance.com and hire someone else to do it for you... or just hired your kids to do it for you. It can be as easy as you want to make it.

OK, I've just proven to you that you can make money off of blogs. In-fact, you can make more money than many people make off of their REGULAR websites. It just takes a little thinking outside the box!

It also takes not being too greedy. What I just showed you works for me because I'm not doing anything that's likely to get me banned from the search engines, Google AdSense, Blogger.com, or any affiliate program. It's only when you get carried away, and do things that harm the search engines that you "shoot yourself in the foot."

Set up blogs providing useful content. Make regular posts to these blogs but not in a manner that seems unnatural. By that, I mean don't auto-post twenty times in an hour, or post every hour for a month! No human can possible post to a blog at these rates for long, so the search engines detect something is "wrong." They don't generally prohibit you from using tools to make your job easier... just don't get carried away!

There are actually, thousands of people earning a living doing things similar to what I just shared... but with little twists. I'm meeting up with many of them in New Orleans in September.
We'll basically be sharing how we make a fortune off of niche websites and programs such as Google AdSense.

About the Author:

Willie Crawford has taught PROVEN Internet marketing techniques to thousands of successful Internet entrepreneurs since late-1996. Grab a free copy of his comprehensive, 20-Lesson Internet Marketing Success Course now at: http://WillieCrawford.com

Blogging For Profit: The Simple Success Strategies Of A 19 Year Old Kid

By Ian Canaway

A blog is a simple but powerful tool which all marketers and businesses should be utilising to explode their sales, build credibility and improve customer retention.

I've been doing a lot of research with regards to blogging and came across a case of a 19 year old kid who was making something ridiculous like $50,000 a year with a blog on mobile phones, from his bedroom! This is an extraordinary case but clearly there is a good earning potential through blogs, however they do take time to grow and build up a readership.

Blogs provide a very simple, quick and easy means to add fresh content to your website. As I'm sure you've heard many times over 'content is king' from a search engines' view point and by providing high quality, regularly updated content your website should benefit with regards to your search engine ranking.

By providing fresh, high quality relevant content you will gain an increase of both first time visitors and repeat visitors, they will come back to check out your new content. Providing it's interesting, relevant and useful to them, you will begin to build relationships with your readers, increasing your credibility and building their trust in you and your business.

These repeat visitors will be exposed to your messages more and begin to trust you and your recommendations. This in turn will fuel sales and referrals. Just make sure you don't recommend a product you haven't tried, if it is bad you will lose all credibility.

Whenever you buy a new product, review it in your blog and be brutally honest, your readers will love you for it. Take a completely unbiased view point and talk about both the positives and negatives of each product. In essence you are providing more of an insight into the product than the sales page itself, this will help convert those prospects that are 'sitting on the fence' so to speak. As it has been shown that prospects are seven to ten times more likely to buy from a blog recommendation than from other sources!

There are many ways in which you can monetize your blog, for example, by using it as a tool to promote your own products or affiliate programs. Other ways that you can generate extra income through your blog are through the Google Adsense program, selling banner/link space as your traffic increases or by adding you own opt-in sign up form to which you send your newsletter or other targeted offers.

Your blog can be syndicated using RSS, enabling savvy webmasters to use your blog content on their web pages. This benefits them as they have regularly updated fresh content for their website and benefits you through increased exposure, free targeted traffic and extra inbound links.

To get the most benefit from my blog I use a technique called 'blogging and pinging', whereby every time I post to my blog, I ping Ping-o-matic.com to inform the search engines and blog directories I've updated my blog.

You should submit your blog feed to blog directories to gain more exposure. You can do this manually however, these are three automated sources that I have had the most success using and best of all.they are free!

http://pingomatic.com/
http://www.rssfeedpromoter.com/
http://www.feedsubmitter.com/

Be passionate about your blog, love your blog. If you do not then it will become obvious through your posts and you are unlikely to be anywhere near as successful as you could be.

Add to your blog regularly provide good quality content and reviews and you will be on your way to blogging success.

About The Author:

Get your FREE step by step guide to setting up your first blog, visit: http://www.trafficstrategiesonsteroids.com/blogsetup.pdf. Ian Canaway will help you launch your very own money making website today that's 100% ready to take orders and pull in massive profits for you right now. guaranteed! http://www.asuccesfullhomebusiness4u.com/

RSS: The Wave Of The Future For Ezine Publishing

By Ken Hill

A powerful innovation, known as RSS or really simple syndication, is destined to revolutionize the way ezines are delivered to their subscribers.

In fact, Microsoft's plans to add RSS to the new version of their Internet Explorer and Longhorn operating system means that RSS will become mainstream very soon.

How can publishing your ezine in RSS profit you?

By using RSS to publish your ezine, you'll be able to completely bypass the email filters that cause many ezines to lose their profitability.

You'll also be able to have complete control over your ezine's content, making your messages much more effective because you won't have to worry about your ezine getting blocked.

In addition, you'll never lose subscribers due to them changing email addresses.

As long as your readers continue to subscribe to your feed, they'll continue to get your RSS ezine, regardless of which email they use.

Now, the key to creating a successful RSS ezine is providing your readers with valuable content.

First and foremost, your readers are going to want useful, informative content from you, and by giving them what they want, you'll be on your way to:

a) more sales of your products
b) more commissions when you recommend your affiliate programs, and
c) more repeat ad sales, because you'll have a very responsive subscriber base.

An excellent way for you to add your own winning content to your ezine is to write articles on the topic your ezine covers.

Through your articles you'll be able to:

- build up your reader's trust in you.
- increase your status as an expert in your field.
- add your own unique voice and style to your ezine.
- successfully promote your business through your resource box at the end of all your articles.

In addition to writing your own articles, you can ask your readers to send you their articles, or you could publish "free to reprint" articles in your ezine.

Some article writers also make their articles available to their affiliates to earn commissions.

You simply join their affiliate program and then publish their articles with your affiliate link in the resource box.

By doing this, you'll be able to easily increase your commissions.

And if you have an affiliate program, you can also use this strategy to get more new affiliates that will successfully promote your products and add to your bottom line.

About the Author:

Ken's articles on ezine publishing have been published in numerous ezines and web sites all over the net. For more articles and resources that will help you to get started publishing your own successful ezine, visit Ken today at: http://www.ezinepublishers.net

The Hybrid Blog and Ping

By Keith Baxter

For the past two years, one of the best SEO inclusion tactics was the use of blogs. Blogs have become a base standard in SEO marketing, but as times change, so does the efficacy of any tactic.

With that said what worked two years ago certainly isn't the same thing that's working now. The worst part is that uninformed marketers are still teaching the old methods of SEO marketing with blogs to the masses.

In this article, you will be enlightened to the newest form of SEO marketing with blogs.

Let's begin by eliminating a huge fallacy.

The blog and ping is a process by which you post a snippet of information from your site to a blog (mainly blogger.com) with a URL to your site included, and then notify Yahoo that a post exists on this blog. The idea is that your blog will be spidered quickly by both Google (due to blogger.com) and Yahoo.

You only need to blog and ping a maximum of 10 pages from your site. The entire purpose for doing this is to attract search engines to your site and let them spider the rest of your site on their own. You can equate this process to renting links. You simply rent one link to your site in order to get the spiders to visit your site.

Unfortunately money hungry marketers came along, didn't understand the concept, and then took it upon themselves to teach people that every page on your site required blogging and pinging. To top it off, these same uninformed marketers began teaching their followers that three pages should be processed every 15 minutes.

The blog and ping isn't as effective as it was a year ago because of these numbskulls.

With that said, it was time for the process to evolve. Its efficacy was diminished due to misuse and misguided education.

So where has it evolved to?

It's evolved into an organic blog that grows of its own. This blogging system receives its data from remote sources and posts on a consistent, yet infrequent basis. It pulls usable and visitor friendly data from a variety of sources, while still hosting the links you want found by the search engines. This blog informs over 50 blog directories every time an automated post is made, making it extremely valuable to the search engine algorithms.

How is this accomplished?

First, you need Wordpress (http://wordpress.org) and RSS to Blog(http://www.stealthtrafficsecrets.com/rsstoblog.html). Once you've downloaded both of these, make sure you install them.

Once installed, configure Wordpress per the instructions found here:
http://www.stealthtrafficsecrets.com/wordpress-tricks/.

Second, create a list of links from your site which will be used in this new hybrid blog and ping tactic. One of the bonuses for RSS to Blog is a tool that does this automatically for you.

Third, add these harvested links to the RSS to Blog system and hit save. Set your cron to post out as often as you like and you're done.

That's it in a nutshell.

There are a couple of additional points I need to make,

First, when using RSS to Blog you also have the ability to add additional data from other sources in order to make your Wordpress blog readable by the masses.

Second, the Wordpress tricks book gives you the knowledge to make your blog more search engine friendly as well as providing a list of blog directories that are automatically notified every time you make an entry.

With this tactic revealed, it's my intention for you to enjoy the quick search engine inclusion that comes as a result of implementation.

About the Author:

This article has been authored by Keith Baxter, the editor and publisher of the fast selling video newsletter at http://www.StealthTrafficSecrets.com. If you wish to learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website, then subscribe to the site now. it's only $7.00 per month!

Blog and Boost Your Search Engine and RSS Traffic

By Kamau Austin

Blogs are much easier to use than any web design software. They can be used to change web content from a browser, email, and even simple desk top software. Blogs are web pages created with automated software that date stamps all changes to content.

One of the more recent secrets people are using to get their websites in the search engines, the last couple of years, is with Blogs. Blogs are short for web logs and are like daily dairies on the web.

Blogs started out as ways for Internet reality types to share their lives with other people on the web, without having to learn very complicated web design applications like Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.

Dreamweaver, the standard professional web design program takes at least 6 months to master. While FrontPage on the other hand looks a lot like Microsoft Word, and therefore can be used a bit more quickly by people just starting out.

Blogs are much easier to use than any web design software. They can be used to change web content from a browser, email, and even simple desk top software. Blogs are web pages created with automated software that date stamps all changes to content.

One of the secrets the web marketers use to get their new websites into the major search engines like (Google - Yahoo! and MSN) is called blog and ping. So many Internet fortunes are being built on this simple technique.

If you want your new website to be indexed (or included in the search engine database) you shouldn't submit it to the search engines -- instead you should blog and ping.

There is a new feature with Google and Yahoo! known as sitemaps, which will also get your site indexed, but most of us will do fine with learning first to blog and ping.

Blogs index and file your web pages automatically according to the way you specify in advance.

Google loves blogs and has its own web based application called Blogger. You can set up a Blogger account for free at Blogger.com.

You should use Blogs for your business to give updates to your customers and supporters every few days on your company's news or inside information. You can also reflect on industry trends with your business blog.

What's nice about blogs if you want to get your site in the search engines or keep the search engines up to date with your latest optimization or content efforts. You can post your new website or page to your blog page and link to that page.

The search engines will visit the blog page more frequently and index your new pages or web sites some times in a day or two. Also make sure when you post a new blog in Blogger.com you set up your account to ping (or notify) the other major blog directories that your blog has been updated.

Or if you want to get your new site into Google go to a high ranked blog listed in Google. If the Blog allows comments give a good comment on the blog. Then link back to the page you want indexed in the Blog.

Make sure you give a worth while or useful comment or it will be considered blog spam by the website administrators. Sometimes blog publishers disable the comment feature for this reason, therefore it is important to have your own blogs especially if you have more than one site.

This will get the Google spider to index your new sites or web pages within a few days and consider your site for its database given the criteria of its algorithm.

If you are looking for a fast, inexpensive and efficient way to build a lot of content on your site, which the search engines will pick up, go to Blogger and open up a free blogging account and join the blogosphere.

- The Love Affair between the Search Engines, Blogs and RSS

I have been extolling the SEO benefits of Blogs since almost two years ago. Although blogs and search engines don't seem to enjoy the free for all love affair they once had, the search engines and blogs seem to still be married "for better or for worst".

The romance and infatuation phase between search engines and blogs has waned because of blog spam. However search engines dare not divorce blogs because they tend to cook up regularly updated content.

Blogs are also search engine friendly in design. As publishers we love blogs because it is an easy way for us to update our sites with new content.

Many top marketers are extolling about the power of blogs and their natural extension RSS feeds. Almost every successful Internet Marketers today is using some variation of blogs and RSS feeds.

Everywhere you go the web gurus are talking about the great upside potential of blogs and RSS. RSS for the purpose of discussing this issue stands for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is presently being used by Internet marketers to share their blog headlines with websites and desktops all over the world. Think of RSS as giving you the ability to blog without boundaries.

People on other websites and with downloadable RSS newsreader software can read your newest blog posts without visiting your site. Sites that value your expertise will in a viral fashion feature your RSS feeds and help generate traffic to your site.

This allows you to leverage traffic from other peoples sites who feature your blog. Moreover, your subscribers who read your RSS headlines on their desktop software will avoid email filters.
Before you explore or upgrade to RSS marketing experiment with desktop newsreaders like Tristana or News Gator. If you prefer to read RSS from your browser download and install Mozilla's FireFox Browser.

RSS feeds will be the next phase in Internet marketing following the search engines, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and joint ventures.

By having people subscribe to your blog's RSS feeds, or having them syndicated on other people's websites you will be getting a running start on the explosion in blog and RSS marketing once Internet Explorer integrates RSS into its browser.

About the Author:

To learn more about Blogs, RSS, and Search Engines visit Kamau Austin's Search Engine Blog at... http://www.searchengineplan.com

11 Ways to Promote Your Blog

By Chileshe Mwape

1. Ping weblogs.com and other search engines. When you ping a blog, you are telling the search engine that you have updated your blog content and that your listing should be refreshed. Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. Pinging your blogs to the search engines is the fastest way to get the search engine robots to visit your blog. Also, many people browse these sites to find something new.

2. Submit your blog address to blog search sites and directories. You can submit your blog's url to websites such as Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex. For a complete list of websites where you can submit your url, go to http://www.guidetorss.com

3. If you have some cash you can promote your blog using pay per click search engines such as Yahoo Search and Google Adwords.

4. Set your blog to display RSS feeds and submit your blog's RSS feed to the major RSS feed directories online. A good place to start is http://www.guidetorss.com/ which provides a list of the top RSS directories.

5. Put your blog URL in your email signature. If you're a regular at any online discussion forum, you can also add your url to your signature line at the bottom of each message you post.

6. Install a blogroll. A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. Services such as Technorati spider your links to tell who's linking to you and who you're linking to. If you show
up on someone's Technorati link list for their site they're likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure. Blog owners can also visit your site to check it out if you show up on their referral logs.

7. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs that you regularly visit. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least.

8. If you plan to have anything printed up, put your blog's web address on it. You can print your blog URL on business cards, stickers, leaflets, etc.

9. Take advantage of blog software features that help to promote your Blog. For example, if you're using Blogger, you can do this by turning on: "Email This Post", "Post Pages" "Site feed" and the Blogger Navbar. These features will help attract new visitors to your blog.

10. Exchange Links with other Bloggers or blog owners. This is another effective strategy for generating targeted traffic to your blog for free. It involves contacting other blog owners for a possible link exchange partnership. All you have to do is locate blogs that are related to yours and contact the webmaster to swap links.

11. Write articles or free reports for other webmasters to publish and put your blog url in the byline. The `byline' is the short paragraph that goes at the bottom of each article and describes who the author is and what they do. If you write good content, your articles will be published by other webmasters and many readers who like your article will go on to visit your blog.

Copyright Chileshe Mwape © 2005.

About the Author:

Chileshe Mwape writes for Debt Consolidation Loans UK: http://www.best-debt-consolidation-loan.co.uk/ Visit our site to consolidate debts and apply for a loan online.

17 Mistakes Professionals Make with Their Blogs

By Denise Wakeman & Patsi Krakoff

Are you getting results from your business blog? Is it
getting harder for you to spend time on your blog because
you're just not seeing how it is going to pay off? If so,
you're not alone. Hundreds of blogs are started each day and
many of them are abandoned after several months because it
takes time and energy to keep a good business blog going.

Make no mistake, blogs are a great tool for building
community, interacting with potential clients, and marketing
your services. And, it's not enough to set one up and post
occasionally. You have to use it effectively to drive
traffic and gain readership.

We've discovered several common mistakes professionals make
with their blogs. Mostly, they aren't using some the
features available to them with their blogging software,
because it hasn't been sufficiently explained. Eyes glaze
over with the mention of RSS, pinging, trackbacks and
permalinks. Professionals may be ignoring these things,
hoping they don't really need to know. But they do if they
want results from their business blog.

Here's a list of what we found on a recent trip around the
professional business blogosphere:

Content:

1. Not posting frequently enough. (Recommended: 2-3 times a
week.)

2. Content is not focused, and the target audience is not
clearly defined.

3. Posting articles that are too long, instead of using
extended post features.

4. Not linking profusely (because the professional isn't
researching their field on the internet).

5. Poor spelling, bad grammar and typos.

Design

6. No name of author in tag line or on side bar.

7. No author photo.

8. No signature or name in the footer; no way to tell who
wrote post on a multi-author site.

9. No subscription form; no way to get blog updates through
RSS or email.

10. No way for readers to leave comments and use
trackbacks.

11. Too many categories or none at all.

12. No information about their business services and
products.

13. Calendars for no reason at all (what is the point of
those calendars anyway?).

Marketing

14. Blog isn't submitted to blog directories.

15. Not pinging each time a new post is published.

16. Not using trackbacks referring or linking to other
blogs.

17. No blogroll or list of favorite blogs or websites.

If you're considering using a blog to build your business,
optimize it by taking time to learn the features and steps
that will ensure success. A blog is like any other
marketing tool - you've got to use it correctly to get
positive results.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Get an ebook and take the time to learn about your blog
software or hosting provider.

2. Hire a professional blog expert to coach you on how to
rev up your blog.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

About the Authors:

Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman are two blog experts who
have teamed up to form The Blog Squad
(http://www.fixmyblog.com). They provide advanced training
and coaching for professionals who want to beef up their
blog for marketing optimization. Each month a blog is
selected as Blog of the Month and undergoes a rigorous
makeover. At the end of the month, the blog must pass the
Blog Squad Seal of Approval to be certified a success.
Patsi and Denise also publish a popular blog at
http://www.buildabetterblog.com

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Do Marketers Really Need RSS?

By Rok Hrastnik

The recent Forrester Research study, which claims that only
2% of online households in North America use RSS, took the
internet marketing world by storm. Does this data really
mean that marketers can still afford to ignore this channel?

Soon after the Forrrester study became public, I received a
press enquiery asking whether marketers should be
interested in RSS now that so few online adults use it.

Is this the correct question to ask? Let's take a look at
the bigger picture .

1. THE FORRESTER STUDY VALIDITY

The Forrester study is just one of those available and
cannot be considered as the only relevant study, although
it was conducted on a sample of 68,000 households.

Jupiter Research estimates RSS penetration at 12% of the
American online population, while the latest report from
PEW shows that 9% of the American online population has a
good idea of what RSS is. An October 2004 PEW study
actually estimated RSS penetration at 5%.

It is also important to understand that Forrester data does
not include those that might not even be aware they are
using RSS, especially through services such as My.Yahoo,
which is actually the most popular RSS reader.

Also, at the same time, Forrester Vice President Henry
Harteveldt says that »RSS is critical for any organization
that wants to reach out to people under the age of 30«.

2. THE FUTURE GROWTH OF RSS

Regardless of the numbers we put our faith in, the future
growth of RSS is without question. Microsoft just recently
announced full RSS support in the next edition of their
Internet Explorer browser and full RSS integration in the
next edition of their operating system, the Windows Vista.

Once RSS becomes easily available to most internet users
out-of-the-box and becomes as widely spread as bookmarks,
its adoption will grow at an incredible rate. Microsoft has
now made sure this in fact will happen.

Consequently, the time for marketers to not only become
interested in RSS but also master it is now. Those that
test and discover the best possible ways of using RSS for
marketing will be ahead of their competition once everyone
starts using RSS.

Furthermore, since RSS implementation can actually be free
of any charge, there's no reason not to start providing
your content in RSS feeds now.

3. GOOGLE SHOWS THE WAY

Microsoft and Yahoo! aren't the only big players to show
support for RSS. Google recently launched RSS advertising
as part of their Google AdSense program, giving publishers
reason to start their own RSS feeds to generate direct
revenues.

Those that depend on Google AdSense for part or all of
their online revenues actually need to provide RSS feeds,
or stand to lose some of those revenues due to their
visitors switching to sites and feeds from their
competitors.

Face it, today many users are already starting to request
publishers provide them with RSS to subscribe to their
content. This trend will only continue, with many users
selecting RSS as their primary channel of receiving and
reading online content.

4. THE QUESTIONABLE RELIABILITY OF E-MAIL

All marketers today are experiencing e-mail delivery
problems, constantly wondering whether their messages are
getting through or not. Simply put, e-mail can no longer be
relied on.

For one, offering your content via RSS as a supplement to
e-mail will help you make certain that at least a portion
of your visitors, those that decide for the RSS option,
will be receiving all of your content without any doubt.

Lockergnome.com decided to start pushing RSS instead of
e-mail some time ago, and as a result saw that their RSS
feeds are outperforming e-mail when it comes to
clickthrough rates for about 500%. Also an interesting
fact, they today have 5 times more RSS subscribers than
e-mail subscribers.

And two, for your most important content updates, RSS
really is becoming a must, especially if you need to be in
contact with your existing customers, partners and other
key audiences. If you want to be 100% certain that your
messages reach your audience, RSS is the way to go.

5. OTHER BENEFITS OF RSS

But all of the above don't even touch all the reasons why
marketers should start using RSS today .

a) RSS will help you generate additional traffic and reach
new audiences. Considering the low cost of RSS
implementation, this is reason enough to get started with
RSS today.

b) RSS helps you to easily get your content published on
other sites, thus generating you more credibility and
visitors.

c) As a publisher you can use RSS to display content from
other sources, thus making your site more relevant and
interesting to your existing visitors.

And the list goes on and on.

RSS may not be mainstream yet, but it provides enough
advantages even today to make it a must-choice for
marketers.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

About the Author:

Find out immediately how you can power your online business
with RSS and integrate it in all of your marketing. Request
the free 28-page Business Case for RSS report, with
easy-to-follow instructions, examples and advice on how to
get the most out of RSS in the shortest possible time.

Get the free download here:
http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/case/index.html?src=sa15

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The 7-Step RSS Marketing Plan

By Rok Hrastnik

If you're wondering how to get started with RSS marketing,
here's a basic 7-step plan that should provide some needed
guidance. Use these steps as your personal RSS marketing
checklist to get your started and help you see whether
you're on the right track.

1. START USING RSS AS AN END-USER

The first step to getting started with RSS
marketing/publishing is getting your own RSS aggregator,
subscribing to other RSS feeds and just seeing and
understanding how it all works.

There's a variety of RSS aggregators to choose from. Just a
small sample:

a) Web-based RSS aggregators (websites):
http://my.yahoo.com, http://www.pluck.com,
http://www.newsgator.com, http://www.bloglines.com

b) Desktop RSS aggregators (software):
http://www.awasu.com, http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/,
http://www.stevenwood.org/stories/2003/06/08/voxLite.htm

c) Integrated RSS aggregators (integrate with IE or
Microsoft Outlook):
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (browser with
integrated RSS features), http://www.newsgator.com,
http://www.pluck.com, http://www.attensa.com/index.php?ys=1

2. PLAN YOUR RSS FEEDS

Planning your RSS feeds might be the most important thing
you do about RSS. You most certainly need an RSS feed for
your e-zine, your news section, your articles etc.

But how you will package these, what others you might want
to offer and other important issues, are much more complex
than we can cover in this space. A precise overview of all
of the opportunities is available in the "Unleash the
Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS" e-book at
http://rss.marketingstudies.net?src=sa13

You might also want to do follow-up (autoresponder) RSS
feeds, feeds for your affiliates, feeds for your employees
or business partners, feeds for the media, and so on.

3. CREATE A LIST OF RSS MARKETING/PUBLISHING REQUIREMENTS

Then create a list of requirements for the RSS
marketing/publishing solution you will be getting to
publish your feeds. The list should answer the basic
questions, such as:

a) Do you want to integrate RSS publishing with your
existing content management system?

b) What RSS metrics you'll want to watch? For example, are
you satisfied with just a rough idea of how many people are
reading your RSS feed, or are you interested in more
precise subscriber counts, clicks and even individual
content item popularity?

c) Do you need feed personalization, such as personalizing
your RSS content with the receipient's name and other
details?

d) Do you want to provide your subscribers with the ability
to precisely select the content they want to receive in
your RSS feed (customization), such as by content topic,
keywords, authors and so on?

e) Do you want the RSS feeds to be hosted on your own
server?

f) Do you need the ability to target promotional messages
or other content to your individual RSS feed subscribers,
for example based on their previous clicks and reading
habits, or even their subscription data?

g) What's your budget?

h) Etc.

More information on all the different possibilities
provided