Details of Getting a Blog

Blogs, the abbreviation of Web Logs (online journals), are becoming more and more popular all the time. People are starting new blogs at an astounding rate so it’s safe to assume that there are constantly people out there who want to know how to get a blog going. Despite personal feelings about the actual quality of the majority of blogs out there on the Internet, that’s what I hope to be able to help you do with this article.

First things first, you need somewhere to deposit your thoughts. You need to decide how you want to attack this. Your choices are:

- To use a blog hosting service such as eBloggy (http://www.ebloggy.com) or BlogEasy (http://www.blogeasy.com).

- To host a blog yourself on a server of your own choice.

Both options have their free or paid subsections. The blog hosting services mentioned here are free but there are paid services out there. MSN now offer ‘Spaces’, which are essentially blogs attached to your MSN account and may be of interest to some. Web hosting can also be free or paid but you’ll find it difficult to find a free service that will offer you the features you’ll need to run a blog backend. One place to look is your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that may offer some free web space. This web space often contains as many features as many professional web hosting packages although it offers less space. Blogs tend not to take up a whole lot of room so this shouldn’t be a problem. The advantage of hosting your own blog over using a service is that you have greater control over how it works, how it looks etc. You also don’t have to put up with there being ads on your page (unless you find some free hosting which usually has advertising put at the top of your site). The downside is that it can be a bit more complicated to function.

If you’re going to host your own blog you’ll need to find yourself a blog backend. This is the program that runs on the server and allows you to upload new journal entries while allowing other people to view them. You’ll have to either choose a backend that fits within your web hosting package’s limits or a hosting package that meets the backend’s requirements. The general requirements are PHP and MySQL but you can get some backends that work solely with PHP or even Java. It’s important to make sure that you can change the read/write permissions of the PHP files on your server (using CHMOD or an equivalent, talk to your host—they’ll know what you’re talking about). There’s a nice breakdown of many different beckends and their features and requirements that can be found at, http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm. I personally use Pivot because it doesn’t require MySQL and it has RSS distribution, which is nice.

Once you’ve got yourself a hosting package and a backend you need to install the backend. This can get tricky but most of them come with an install program and you should be able to work through it if you follow the instructions that will undoubtedly come with the package. If you run into difficulties your hosting provider’s support team should be happy enough to help you along.

So now you have yourself a blog up and running; it’s time to fill it with content. What you write is up to you. Generally people write about their lives, how they feel, what they think, and similar topics. You can be much more diverse and creative than this though. You could for example post creative writings on your blog, as well as discuss news and current affairs, or anything else that you can imagine. It’s your personal space to write what you like and get it out there for others to read and give their opinions on.

Making people come and read your blog could take some effort. You need to make them aware that it exists and keep it interesting so that they continue coming back. Nothing kills off a readership base like a lack of updates. At first you can start small with your ‘publicity’ by telling friends and family about it. Put a link to your site in your MSN or other messenger program nickname. Put a link in your email signature so that everyone you email sees it. Get your friends interested and they’ll tell others and you’ll probably be able to build up a small community with relative ease. For attracting the broader public you need ways to let the wider community know you are out there. Spend time at other people’s blogs, make it a habit to head over there and read their posts. If it’s appropriate put a link to your site in a comment box or guest book on their site. Visit forums related to blogs (or just forums in general) and become an active member there. As long as you have a link to your site in your signature, people will probably head on over for a look.

You can also submit your blog to lists such as Blogrank.net (http://www.blogrank.net). These are sites dedicated solely to getting people into blog sites, and while it may be hard to climb into the higher ranks, simply having your site listed will probably improve your hit rate. You could also submit your site to as many search engines as possible. Perhaps you could even write yourself an article like this one with your link in the bio field. Beyond this you’re going to have to work out your own methods for publicizing your site. Just think creatively about how and where you can get a link put in and you’ll be fine.

Getting your blog set up and running can be an involving task but the results will be worth it. A final word of warning: Don’t get too engrossed in your blog. You need a life in order to be able to write about your life! As I wrote in a previous article it has been found that blogging can sometimes have a detrimental effect on a person instead of the positive effect that it was designed for. Try not to write only for yourself; it’s a public forum for others to read so try and write entries that will be of some benefit to the wider community as well as to you. Blog safe and have fun!

Blogs for Kids

Flush out the writer in children. Blogging could draw out a young writer and open doors to their future. Consider encouraging your child to start blogging!

Children love having an audience. The instant recognition and approval that comes from a crowd just can't be beat. Employing blogs to help develop good spelling habits, grammar skills, and develop a love for writing at a young age is an innovative concept that has potential benefits:

Benefits

1.) Responsibility/Commitment - Daily Posts

Regular updates require children to be disciplined and responsible.

2.) Communication - Increased Communication with Friends and Relatives

Blogging or journaling gives children the opportunity to connect with relatives who might live some distance away, communicating important timely issues.

3.) Technology - Exposure to Internet Technologies

Children are growing into technology-laden world. Exposure to innovative Internet technology will help them with communication skills and résumé-building.

4.) Improved Writing Skills

When presented with an audience, children will want to present their "best" work.

5.) Improved Editing Skills

Proofreading is an important skill that is difficult to teach. Editing of daily entries will help children learn how to present their ideas clearly and professionally.

6.) Improved Spelling

Automated spell-checking helps children be aware of spelling errors when they occur.

7.) Typing

Getting children acquainted with keyboards at a young age will help them become familiar with their layout and function, quickly making them proficient typists.

Resource for Blogging Information - http://www.blog-connection.com

Because blogging involves the Internet, parents and teachers should also take the opportunity to educate youngsters about the dangers of the Internet. The Internet is global in its reach and developing safe Internet habits at a young age is critical. Remind children not to disclose personal information including names, addresses or location of events they plan to attend.

Staying Safe Online - http://www.small-business-software.net/staying-safe-online.htm

What vare blogs? Definition and explanation

What are Blogs?

Having heard the term previously but not having paid much attention most are just to afraid to show their ignorance and ask the question, what is a blog? Lets face it; the term blog does not conjure pleasant images.

Blogs are web logs that are updated regularly, usually on a daily basis. They contain information related to a specific topic. In some cases blogs are used as daily diaries about people's personal lives, political views, or even as social commentaries. The truth of the matter is that blogs can be shaped into whatever you, the author, want them to be.

Where Did Blogs Come From?

The roots of blogging can be traced back to the mid 1990's. Who the very first blogger actually was is unclear, as the art of blogging did not really take hold until 1999. The original "weblogs" were link-driven sites with personal commentaries. The very first blogs were human guided Internet web tours. While initially thought of as diaries or online journals, blogs have evolved into the latest fresh web content.

The Future of Blogs

A buzz word in techie circles, "blogging" is the wave of the future. Whether its a fad, or proves to be a new way to communicate with existing and potential customers it deserves at the very least a cursory look.

Why is Blogging Helpful to Businesses or Individuals?

Just as animated .gifs were once cool, blogging is the trendy thing to do. That does not mean that it is not beneficial to businesses. Webmasters struggling to keep fresh, attractive content on their websites to lure visitors back, have found blogs the answer. Content is a necessity for online businesses, both for purposes of being found by search engines but also because it gives visitors a reason to come back.

Now that we have established that blogs are not only trendy but also beneficial to businesses, its important to understand how they can be used to your advantage. We currently manage and update two blogs on a daily basis. The first is our new business blog at:

http://www.notepage.net/blog.htm

This professional business blog allows us the opportunity to tell potential, or existing customers industry news, updates, or generally how mobile or paging software can be used in specific situations to alleviate problems. The bottom line is we control the content. Its updated daily, which increases the chances that search engines will spider on a regular basis and it helps with page rank because it's been submitted to all the blogging directories. Initially started on a whim we've found it beneficial to report tips, tricks or make visitors aware of new regulations related to the mobile or paging industry.

The second blog we manage is at:

http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/blog.html

This blog is less formal and contains marketing tips, or promotional advice for software developers or online marketers. We found that we had overflow from our monthly newsletter. Generating a daily blog would require very little effort and would assist us in creating fresh content which our readers told us was of significant interest.

Blogs & Your Business

The bottom line is you need to determine how a blog will benefit your business, determine a schedule and adhere to it. Let your readers know what to expect and when to expect it. Blogs provide great supplemental content and direct attention to areas of your business that you want to showcase; you direct the content but let your readers guide you.

Creating a Blog

There are numerous online tools that can be used to create a blog. We found that because of security concerns, it would just be best to use a standard html program. In our case we used Dreamweaver and create daily posts. Its really not much more complicated than typing an email. The content is then sent via FTP to a web server. If you want to test the waters there are online web-based tool that helps you publish to the web instantly. The most popular web based tool is likely Blogger http://www.blogger.com.

Other Advantages to Blogs

While you may initially create a blog for your existing customers, you may find that you can attract new customers by illustrating your expertise in a specific field. There are numerous websites that act as "blog search engines", be sure to submit your sites to these websites to increase your exposure. This will also help with your page rank and possibly increase the likelihood you will receive decent ranking with Google. You can also create an RSS feed in order to syndicate blog content and gain additional exposure.

How to put up a Blog on the Internet

Of all people in the world I was easily one of the most pessimistic about computers, the Internet and now that I even know they exist-blogs. I think blogs are pretty cool but I never thought I could have one. I thought the processes of getting a site; domain name and the actual building of the blog would just be out of my league. I’m a complete novice when it comes to technology, but I do like writing a journal, and I thought having a journal on-line would be both fun and make life simpler for me. No more writing with pens, other people can read my stuff and comment on it, and I could add pictures to illustrate my points and make things look more interesting.

Well, now I’ve got one! It’s awesome. I won’t lie and say it was easy, but I think if you hook up with a good web hosting company it’s not such a daunting experience as you might expect. I got a few work mates to help me. I went through a couple administrative hitches when filling in my personal information forms for the registration-just because I’m a bit silly in the head. We had a little trouble with the blog program we used, but these challenges were eventually overcome. My boss says he’s going to make a simple program that people can hook up easily.

I chose my domain name: thepowerofeverythingthatis.com. It’s my own name-no one else on Earth can have it. I own it. I picked a nice picture out for the background-it looks really sweet, much better than a blank sheet in a diary. I got it from a site that gives photos out without charging a royalty (the first few): www.istockphoto.com.

I just want you to know the great feeling I got when I first typed in my domain name and my site came up! It was the equivalent to a person who’s afraid of heights being accepted into an astronaut’s mission into outer space. Or maybe it was like a turtle driving a Ferrari 300km per hour. Possibly it was like all the ants in the world getting together for peace talks.

It’s a real blast having this blog. I can write on it any time, anywhere, from my laptop, at an Internet café etc. I can write as much as I want, and I’m hoping one day my writing may inspire others to communicate with me about the subjects that I’m interested in.

Look, if you like writing about anything, and want to have your thoughts and opinions on the Internet, maybe meeting others similar to yourself in the progress; you have to get a blog and get it now. Don’t be afraid any longer, the world is in the palm of your hands; it’s time to get on!

Blogging For Business Bible

The items covered here are:

1) Don't Wait before Blogging.

2) Using Blogs to get your site found quickly.

3) What have Blogs and PR got to do with Indexing.

4) How to get your large sites pages found quickly.

5) If you're using Adsense on those Pages - learn from this.

6) If you're selling Clickbank products - you need this.

1) Don't Wait before Blogging.

If you've been looking at creating a blog but don't know how or why to do it, stay tuned for a new product announcement that'll help you out.

Just to show you how quick and easy it can be, I've created several new blogs and fed them all through 'feedburner' to add tracking facilities and I'll be conducting some tests and giving you the results when I'm done.

I now use Blogger for 30 different blogs. It's easy to use, you can include Adsense within their interface easily, you can have it ftp the files to be hosted automatically on your own website etc. etc.

If you want tracking, whether you host the blog your self or not, you can go to Feedburner and 'burn' the feed. This will not only giving you tracking stats but also let you tweek it to be more compatible (Bloggers default output format is .atom) and also add other revenue streams to it.

I've blogged an introduction to RSS which I believe is currently the best free information around Here , and the 'burnt' version is: Blogging

Video tutorials for setting up a blog, configuring the blog, pinging, 'burning feeds' etc. are available here:
http://pheedcentral.com/blogandping_offer.html

2) Using Blogs to get your site found quickly.

If you're struggling to get new websites found by the Yahoo Search Engine, here's a little tip you might like.

Set up a Blog with whichever service you prefer (I like Blogger.com)Go over to Yahoo.com and setup a 'MyYahoo' account. It's free.

Then on your MyYahoo homepage and goto the section that says 'choose content' and then tick the box that says RSS Headlines (BETA).

Add your feed url(s) to this, so that they are shown on your MyYahoo page.

Yahoo will be around with 48 hours. I've created videos of this that I'll release very soon.

3) What have Blogs and PR got to do with Indexing.

The reason that Blogs and PR are linked to getting indexed is this:-

A) When you setup a blog it's not quite the same as having a new website because there's one major difference - Even if they don't have the facility built in, you can effectively 'announce' the presence of your blog (and any new content you add to it) by 'pinging' (sending an announcement to) several large blog directories. In effect, this is like doing the 'add url' on a search engine, except that blogs get visited Very quickly whereas it could take ages for your site to get indexed this way.

If you use Blogger then there's a tickbox labelled "ping Weblogs" which if selected, will announce your new content to the Weblogs.com service whenever you post new material - this has the effect of getting the Googlebot (not mediabot) to visit your blog sometimes within minutes. Thus, if you've linked to some new pages on your site (some deep pages) - they usually also get a visit pretty quickly.

It's like getting a link from somewhere you know gets spidered regularly - except you can cause it to be spidered. (which is nice).

If you want Yahoo to come and see you quickly too, whether you're using Blogger or a different blogprogram, you can create a free MyYahoo account and add your feeds to it - that'll have the effect of 'announcing' them to Yahoo.

Again, the reason for this isn't to make your blog rank well - it's to get the links to your actual websites new pages to get spidered quickly because you're using the blog to call the bots for a visit and linking from the blog to your new pages.

B) The Page Rank comments - These are a reflection of the fact that in general, higher page rank sites get visited by the bots more frequently (since you can have a high PR from good internal linking and a few high PR incoming links from sites without much traffic - this is a generalisation and NOT a rule), so it's more likely that if you're not blogging and pinging that a few high PR links (from traffic heavy sites) will be a good alternative.

If you want even more, here's something I wrote on another forum recently (and in my blogs) about getting a high page count site indexed quickly:

4) How to get your large sites pages found quickly.

No-one can guarantee that your site will be indexed in 24 hours since the only person with ultimate control is Google.

However, the key to getting a new site fully indexed is deep linking.

If you were to just leave the site and get links to the index page, you could end up waiting 9 months to get it all in.

Have you created a site map(s).

Depending on your site, it may pay you to create several site maps for different parts of your site.

The basic principle is this:

The Search Engine Bots will investigate pages that they find links to from pages that they're already visiting (you know this since you mentioned blog and ping).
When they do this, the work on a portion of the pages they've found about about at a time, so the more pages and the deeper the links to those pages - the longer it will take and the more times the bot will need to come back to get more.

So, the most effective thing you can do is: Create several site maps which cover lots of pages that have fairly shallow linking the get to them all (normally 2 levels max).

So rather than having 1 huge site map that lists every page. Create 5 site maps of 1000 links, or even more.

Then - Get links to these separate site maps aswell as your main index page. From as many different, high quality, high traffic sources as you can.

Blogs, RSS, Forums, Directories are all good examples of these.

If you get desparate you can buy links from high PR sites, but there's no need.

Any of the large, popular forums probably get visited by the bots every day (my own site does).

If you're not sure where to find directories to submit to, I've put together a huge list here: http://www.moneyandmotivation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=162

If you want places to submit your blog/rss feed, I've put together a good list here: http://pheedcentral.com/weblinks/Submit_Your_Own_RSS_Feeds/

Jason Bradley has a product called IndexTracker that you can use to track indexed pages across all of your websites. I use it a lot.

Blog and Ping tutorial videos are available here:
http://pheedcentral.com/blogandping_offer.html

5) If you're using Adsense on those Pages - learn from this.

Improving Adsense click through rates is something that any ppc advertiser should be interested in.

Well, I've spent some time now looking at all the various keyword research tools for selecting the most profitable keywords to target with Adsense.

To my delight, I also stumbled upon an ebook written by a guy called Jonathan Legar that covers it all. He also provides you with a huge list of profitable keywords (including some that are as much as $100 a click - yes you heard me right)

I just had to tell you about this amazing resource.

I know you'll just love this resource.

http://hop.clickbank.net/?techtrader.astracker

When you see that Jonathan is also going to let you reprint over 11,000 article - this is a Must Have for any website owner or PPC advertiser.

Have fun with it.

6) If you're selling Clickbank products - you need this.

If you sell Clickbank products, you're probably aware of the fact that the Clickbank Marketplace is updated regularly, and as an affiliate it can be difficult to remember what products you're advertising and whether there are any more in that same category of CB yet.

Well, now you can forget about the hassles of keeping up with the product in Clickbank, or buying tools to let you search Clickbank, and then working out how to advertise those products on your web pages. You know it sounds simple, but it can be a real pain to get setup and maintain.

If you take a look here: http://www.imvisionary.com/cmd.php?af=186978

You'll find a new tool - It's only just being released (not yet in the open) and you'll see that it gives you an really easy, cheap and quick way to market ClickBank products.
It'll synchronise with Clickbank Whenever you want and you can even search for products to promote.

How Blogs Can Be An Excellent Promotional Tool

Blogs as an online promotional strategy if done right could save you huge dollars in reaching out to people. This is also a medium where you need have absolutely no dependence whatsoever on any professional help and you can do everything yourself. That is money saved right from the beginning.

So what is a blog and how does it work? Blog is simply a web log or a diary which you maintain online posting various comments every day or even several times a day. In all aspects it is like a web page. With small differences. No more the fancy html pages, page links, graphics etc.

While you can have all these, the purpose is not show design excellence but to provide juicy information, news, and happenings from your specific industry. Each posting is like a web page technically atleast as the the Search Engines looks at it as a separate page. We will see more on search engines later. The posts also carry links to other similar pages where you can direct people who visit your blog. Your visitors too can post comments and you have the option of editing it or even deleting it.

How does one use a blog as an online promotional tool?

You are a specialist in the area of your business. You also have people working for you with specialized domain knowledge of that particular area. You make hundreds of observations during the course of a week, you come across useful news and articles, websites, all which if collected in one place could act as the source of information for your customers, your public and even the trade and competition.

All you need to do is write a couple of lines in a conversational tone as if you are speaking to someone close about what you feel and think about anything you come across and provide the links for more details.

There you got a web page rich in key words! Key words to put it simply are a lot of specific words about your trade which is how the search engines find you and list you.

Blogs offer features like linking, pinging, RSS feeds etc. which are very simple features about which you can learn as you build your blog. However the idea is not to get technical. Remember we are here to talk about promotional strategies that could save you money and explode your sales.

Blogs are a comparatively recent phenomenon. There are an estimated 5 million blogs growing by the thousands every hour. Don’t despair. 5 million is nothing compared to billions of web pages and website available on the www. You are still far ahead of your competition. And in your area of business or profession you may be the first. That means you just occupy the top slot in search engines.

So get in right away and post all the rants, ravings and all that you ever wanted to say but couldn’t.

How does a blog help you earn revenues or improve your sales?

Now let us say you have set up your blog. Ask yourself as a person of the trade or as a customer what all you would like to know everyday. Whatever is your answer is what you post every day. You also come across news or websites which you think might be useful to your customers. Simply make a mention of it with a link to the news or website. The idea is to make people come to your blogs every day seeking information. So you become famous as a specialist in that area. All your visitor are in a way interacting with you everyday and begin to accept your words and your recommendations if they see the benefits. But be sure to be very honest and transparent. It is like your personal or social relationships where any dishonesty would make people shy away from you.

You can always put in a few posts about your work, your employee who got a promotion or birth of a daughter or anything which also makes it a little warm and personal. You can post about your launches, your predictions, products which are running out, and even promote products not moving well but you feel can benefit the customer.

What you blog can reach millions globally within hours. As an illustration take the example of the recent Tsunami which hit parts of Asia. I am from the southern part of India which is one of the worst affected areas. While the conventional media was struggling to reach their reporters all over within the hour bloggers flashed the news including the details of the people lost and found, mobilized resources for the affected and the world wide web was abuzz with all the bloggers picking up and linking and connecting everything and everyone. This is an illustration of a social cause for which blog was put to good use.

Similarly there have been many instances when business news have been picked up by the industry and consumers through the RSS feeds.

The possibilities of using a blog is endless. The key to building a successful blog is listed below.

Remember to be focused on a topic that relates to your area of work.

Your entries must be in a conversational tone speaking directly to them as if you are sitting across with a friend in a restaurant or playing golf to add personalization to your marketing effort.

Post entries or comments which would benefit people.

Post as often or frequently and keep the blog updated.

Encourage visitor participation. Ask for comments and feedbacks.

Create a huge web of outside resources and other similar blogs to help you achieve both outgoing as well as incoming links to enhance search engine popularity. This also shows your customers that you are widely knowledgeable and clued in on your field of expertise.

While it may be a good idea to post a few photographs to break the monotony keep the blog simple and straight without too many graphics and photos.

Content is the key to making your blog successful and encourage repeat visits. In the beginning you may not have many visitors but as the content improves there would be a lot of traffic as well as inbound links.

This is truly a gorilla marketing tool that can make a huge difference to your total marketing efforts.

Tips to Marketing With Blogs

I’ve spent months answering questions from marketers about blogs and blogging and how they fit into the marketing mix. Still, 99% don’t understand the power of blogging.

What most marketers don’t seem to grasp is the “people element". People have wants and needs and a desire to fill them. People want to belong to something bigger - a group, an organization. They want to be recognized and respected by their peers, noticed by leaders in their group and looked up to by their followers. Social. Community. Acceptance. Fellowship. Trust.

Key Marketing Concept: Fill people’s wants and needs. Help them feel a sense of belonging, a sense of trust and they will spend their money.

In other words, build a rapport with people. People. Not Traffic, not Visitors, not Prospects… People.

Don’t just post articles on your blogs, post “messages". Forget salesletters on your blog, post “reviews". If you want to include an affiliate link in a post, say so.

How do YOU feel about the product or service you’re blogging about? Are you passionate or confident, based on personal experience, that a product is all or more than it’s cracked up to be? What’s your real opinion on the product? Have any ideas or tips on how that product can be of even more use to your followers?

Blog about it, honestly, passionately. And for heaven sakes enable your blogs commenting feature so you can discuss your views with your community. That’s where the real power of blogs is - the personal interaction.

Reasons Companies Should Blog

Below are the top 9 reasons why companies should blog.

1. They the perfect public relations tool. Their personal nature gives you and your organization a unique voice online - a voice heard by the people who matter - your customers and clients, other bloggers and the media.

2. Blogs act as instant-feedback mechanisms. They allow readers to respond to your posts via the comments section or link to them on their own blogs using Trackback. These features provide near real-time feedback on ideas, opinions and issues that affect them, or highlight and address new or existing problems.

3. Blogs help to position you and your company as experts and leaders in your industry.

4. Their simplicity and addictive nature allow you to share more of your knowledge more often. Blogs are about sharing what you know, think and believe on an ongoing basis.

5. Search engines index your blog posts more often because of more frequently updated content. Your ongoing blog and knowledge sharing shows up in the search results, making it easier for your customers and prospects to find you.

6. You can have many conversations with many people at once - something nearly impossible in the brick and mortar world.

7. They’re automatic buzz-machines. Go ahead and try it. Blog about something new - a new product or service launch, an improvement to an existing product, or a newly appointed manager. See how fast the news spreads throughout the blogosphere.

8. They’re self promotional due to their RSS feeds being aggregated across the net almost instantly, exposing your knowledge to a growing number of potential company evangilists.

9. Companies who blog are considered early adopters, thought leaders and “in". Blogging is cool and companies who blog are cool.

But the most important thing to remember when blogging is that you’re not a speaker talking to an audience, you are sharing and interacting. You are one more voice to be heard and how powerful that voice is depends on how much interacting you do. It’s the opposite of Advertising.

Tips for Better Blogging - Promote any Product or Service

People start blogs for all kinds of reasons. Ego. Political comment or agenda. Staying in touch with family and friends. Marketing. Why did you start your blog?

If you want your blog to get read, and your readers to be loyal followers, you had better structure it to their liking. Here are some tips for better blogging and basic blogging advice for anyone who wants to promote a product or service using blogs and RSS.

Write in a conversational tone. Forget what you learned in school, and just write the way you'd speak. Think of yourself as talking to a friend, or writing a letter to a friend when you compose the entries to your blog.

Check your spelling and grammar. In spite of what I just said above, use your spell checker, and a grammar checker if you have it. You'll have zero credabilatee if you can't even spell it!

Pick an interesting topic, and stick with it. People don't want to know what you ate for breakfast, or who broke your heart lately. They read your blog looking for information, and they won't stick around long unless they perceive you as a credible expert on whatever topic you
are writing about.

Stay informed. Especially if your blog is of a business nature, do enough research to be informed of the latest trends and information. If you expect to maintain your credibility, you had better know what you're talking about. Be prepared to write about the latest developments and hot new trends. Don't just "rehash" old stuff that has been around forever, and blogged to death.

Be yourself. If you're naturally funny, or opinionated, many of your readers will love you for it. They want information, but they also want to be entertained. If you can combine the two, you have a ready-made formula for success.

Keep it short. Blog readers aren't looking to read a novel on your blog. Keep your entries short and to the point. A couple of hundred words is more than enough. If you have more to say, split it into a series of entries, or write it up as an article and post it somewhere, and then link to it from a shorter entry in your blog. By the way, that's a great way to use natural links to get both links and traffic to a website.

Update frequently, but don't burn yourself out. Many of the blogs I've visited seem to contain a few entries, and then go stagnant for months. Others will have a flurry of entries, and then nothing. In both cases, they're going to die. You need to update with some regularity, to keep your
readers coming back. It seems to me that a couple of times per week ought to do it, but I'm not aware of any studies that would back that up. Blog every day, or every hour, and you'll burn out quickly.

Don't post nonsense. If you have nothing new to say, keep your fingers off that keyboard! Better to have some really gritty commentary on an irregular basis, than to fill your blog up with fluff and drive away your fans.

Don't turn your blog into a blatant sales pitch. If you're using your blog as a marketing vehicle, be subtle about it. People hate the feeling they are being subjected to a sales pitch. You can weave references to your product, or affiliate links, into solid, informative content, which is what people will read your blog looking for. Give them what they want!

Happy Blogging!

Marketing with Blogs and RSS Feeds

Perhaps you still don't realize or fully understand the power of RSS Feeds as a marketing tool.

After all, email works fine, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, the truth is:

1. It's getting harder to send e-mails to the prospect's inbox because of SPAM filters

2. People are getting numbed by the amount of e-mails they receive everyday

3. People are not reading their e-mails

4. It's getting harder to get people to opt-in or subscribe to your newsletter or content.

With RSS feeds, this changes the playing field:

1. RSS feeds can bypasses email - Eat your hearts out! Rss feeds can be read by desktop software
and delivered right to your prospect everytime they turn on their PC

2. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate content rich news in your niche market and attract targeted
prospects

3. People who subscribe to newsfeeds are generally in the higher income bracket and educated.
They want to find news and information to solve their problems. Can that person be YOU?

4. E-mail doesn't allow yourself to be branded all over the Net. With RSS feeds, your content gets
circulated/sydnicated and you can brand yourself as an expert.

5. RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS feeds directories, which will list your site within 24 hours
which measn more traffic for you

These are just some of the few examples of the use of RSS feeds you can use in your marketing.

What are you waiting for? My multimedia e-book cuts to the chase and shows you in VIDEO how to start a blog, create a feed, track it, list it in Yahoo, submit it and mORE..

Usings tags in blogs

Tags - Revolutionary or Just Folly?

Just another trend or something else?

Trends happen overnight! Some catch on fast
and explode very quickly into our every day use.

Most of these trends you can ignore as silly folly
or at the most fine amusement. Anyone remember
pet rocks, Farrah Fawcett hairdos, or last year's
killer fashions?

Others, you have to pay more attention to: cell phones,
digital cameras, mini-sites, optin lists, or email.

Right now, there's another trend you should keep
your eye on: 'tags'.

What are tags? And why should you care about them?

Tags are a way of sorting and linking all that information
in blogs and RSS Feeds. It groups together all the
information on one particular subject.

It's a democratic 'search engine' for blogs.

Think of a 'tag' as a 'keyword' to be used in blogging
and RSS Feeds (Feed tags are still in the works).

Tags have hit the radar lately because Technorati, which
indexes 4.5 million blogs, started sorting blog posts by
using tags.

They have created a folksonomy, drawing tags from
different sources, mainly Flickr.com which sorts or
groups pictures and from del.icio.us -- where you
create a tag when you bookmark a page.

Or if your blogging software has categories -- this will
be recognized by Technorati as a tag.

If you want to create a 'tag' it's very simple; just place
this code in your blog:

<*a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Computers" rel="tag">Computers<*/a>
(remove asterisks in actual code)

and you will have created a tag for computers.

A tag makes it easier and faster to find information on
your favorite subject. It gives you a cross section of real
views and opinions floating in the ether.

There are some inherent problems in this system; will the
posts grow so quickly and so large -- it's like 'finding a
needle in a haystack' or will you have to dig thru a lot of
muck to find the scattered diamonds. Or maybe a ranking
system will be put in place but this goes against the
'democratic code' of blogging.

Regardless, the traffic and marketing potential of 'tags'
could be very beneficial to those who use it to their advantage.

A marketer with a product to introduce or promote could
aggressively target tags as part of their advertising
budget. As blogging increases in popularity -- it's something
to watch!

As a website owner -- tags could be a great source of
targeted traffic. And the keyword here is 'targeted'.

It's the kind of visitor you want coming to your site or blog.
It can only lead to a better quality visitor. Similar to
a visitor coming from the major search engines. One that
is really searching for your information.

The next big question, how will marketers exploit these
tags to make a few bucks? Everyone knows that's coming!

Will we have a 'tag search engine' that can rival the quality
of a Google or Yahoo? Or do we need one?

As with any new trend -- you never know how it will play out.

Some interesting questions have yet to be answered:

Tags are basically keywords for blogs -- but as everyone
knows the quality of links to these tags are not all equal.
Will someone step in and rank these or will they remain
democratic?

Just how will tags work for building content or links to your
site? How will the search engines use these tags? How will
marketers and advertisers exploit the potential of all this
content and the content's viewers?

Will we have tag-spamming? (Just what we need another form
of spamming!) Someone flooding these tags with thousands of links
to get traffic or sell a product.

Not to hype it too much but there's a real 'we're entering unknown territory' feeling with blogging and RSS lately. Heady days for those keeping a close watch on the events unfolding. There are countless applications probably already in the works for tags!

It could be the start of something big or it could just fizzle.

In any case -- keep your eyes peeled to that cursor! There's
probably a tag on the end of it!

This trend may just offer more than fine amusement.

Build a Niche Site With a Blog

Building niche sites is all the rage these days.

The basic strategy is very simple. Find a niche market that isn't oversaturated. Develop a list of related keywords people are searching on. Then write an article optimized for each one of your keywords. Once you have your articles, upload them to your site. Monitize your site with affiliate links and Adsense.

For this kind of niche site to be effective and make money, it is imperative that you get free traffic, and a lot of it. And that's exactly where a blog can be your best friend.

At its very simplest, a blog is just a structure. It's the bones of a web site. A blog is a simple way to publish and display your content online. Most of us think of blogs as a chronicle of news events, or commentary on news and items of interest. Or personal diaries.

Few people stop to think that you can build any kind of website with a blog. In reality, a blog can be used very effectively to build a niche site. The fact of the matter is, a blog is the easiest way to publish your niche site content. But the biggest reason to use a blog is that it can drive traffic to your site a lot faster than a statically-built site. A niche site built with a blog is a very powerful strategy.

First, choose your niche and research your keywords. Write your first article based on one of those keywords, just as you would when building a regular site. Then set up your blog and publish that article. Your niche site is now live.

To make your site structure the most effective, be sure to choose a blog that allows the use of Categories, such as Word Press or Moveable Type. Use your 10 most important keywords as the name of your Categories. Then file all your secondary keyword articles under those Categories.

Why is this so important? If you keep building your site with keyword-rich articles, eventually you could have hundreds of pages. Each of those pages will have a link to your 10 Categories. And each of those links will use the anchor text of your most important keywords. As a result of all those internal keyword-rich links, your site will end up ranking very well in the search engines for your Category names.

Now it's time to set up your traffic strategy. This is where a blog can really shine. There are many special RSS/blog directories that are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new blog to these directories, you can start getting traffic almost immediately. Quite often these feeds will result in a lot more traffic than all the major search engines combined. This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site as a blog. You can have twice the traffic, and get it much faster than with a static site.

Here is a list of some of the top RSS/blog directories you should submit your site to:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Once you've submitted your site to the directories, you can get it indexed by Yahoo almost immediately by adding your RSS feed to your MyYahoo page. If you don't have a MyYahoo page, just go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the MyYahoo link at the top and set up your free account. Once you have your account set up, click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box.

When you go back to your MyYahoo page, your blog plus your first post should be shown. If you go look at your web stats for your site, you'll find that the Yahoo spider has already made a visit! Your new site should be indexed in Yahoo in just a couple of days. This is a strategy that some marketers were selling for $50 just a few months ago. And it works like a charm.

Every time you add a post, you can alert the RSS/blog directories by "pinging" them. There is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes this very easy. You just have to type in your blog URL and Pingomatic will send your ping to Yahoo and about 15 other large directories. That will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately!

During the first month, I would suggest that you write and add a new article every day. Blogs that are frequently updated get the most traffic. And you'll find that the major search engines will spider your site every day. At the end of a month, you'll have a 30-article niche site that is already getting a lot of traffic. If you've monetized your site with Adsense and related affiliate programs, you should also be making money already.

Once you've started building your niche sites with a blog, you'll never go back to doing it the old way again!

Top Ways blogging can save Money

Even though I’ve had several personal blogs for years, I’ve only been officially business blogging since 2003. So in going back over expenses for the last quarter, you can imagine my shock when I realized that my overall business costs were down about 19%. What saved me so much money? Surprisingly, blogging. How can you save money with your blog? It's pretty simple, so I'll be brief. Attract search engine traffic without paying the big bucks If you want Google, Yahoo and MSN to pay attention to you, blog. It doesn't have to be a whole new site, just add a directory to your existing site and start blogging. Most blog software solutions are either cheap or free. And you can find out most basic blog information online for free (really, sometimes just typing your question into Google will do it.) by people who've actually done it. For less than $100, you can build a small library of blog tips and secrets, written by successful business bloggers. Instead of buying links, get one-way links from blog search engines and directories, as well as getting your RSS feed content displayed at other sites. Linking is a great way to get search engine attention and click traffic. Some people get links by trading; others by including their links at the end of freely distributed articles. Others pay to be listed, or to get linked. In each of these scenarios, some type of trade takes place, money, free content, or a link back. When you blog, you'll find plenty of search engines and directories that are willing to list you free of charge. For the most part you won't need to link back - you'll get a one-way link from site favored by search engines, often using text that you select yourself. If 90 or more of these free, legitimate links back to your site is worth your time, then get you blog in motion. Not only that, if you update frequently, other sites may want to display your RSS feed content on their sites. To encourage them to do so, put a link on your page with instructions on how to do so. Ever since I put one on the front of my site, various feeds from my main site have turned up in the most unexpected places. Cheaper way to study your audience. As your blog gets more popular, you may start to find that on any given day, you have a representative cross-section of prospects and clients at your site. If you have a question for them, you can just... ask. True, you can post a link to a survey in your newsletter or on your site, but these are not as interactive as the ability for your audience to comment. They will comment, and you can reply to ask them to expand, or clarify. Conversation gets going and before you know it, a bond is formed, a much stronger bond than occurs in a one-way conversation. Cheaper (and faster) way to start a resource or authority site. Five years ago, if you wanted to start an authority site, your best bet was to build a portal with a specialized directory at its core. Three years ago, you were better off starting a forum with a resource section attached to it. Last year, your top bet was a feed-enabled content management system, especially as more parts of content management systems began to have content feeds related to them. (I have 12 feeds for each of my PHP-Nuke based sites, though they don't work as well with Google Tap.) Now, if you want to be the expert, you want to start a blog. If you're blogging consistently, you have a hub of information collected that will inspire return traffic. You have a collection of links to articles, sites, and tools. You can constantly write up your own opinion editorials on each of these items, as well as fact-based analysis of news and events that can help your audience make better choices. As blog software matures you can now categorize, and alphabetize your links, and with the ability to ping multiple sources as well as leave trackback links to other sites, you can send your readers through a ring of related, freshly updated information that ultimately leads back to you. Spend less money on advertising as your blog becomes more popular I can’t promise you that you’ll never spend another red cent on advertising costs. However, the amount of free advertising you get from having your blog link or RSS feed listed in dozens of search engines and directories, and popping up in feed readers is not to be underestimated. You’ll probably still want to do some ezine advertising when your new ebook or software release is debuted. But you may not need to buy as much advertising or purchase as often. Then there is the fact that many newsletters that are also published to RSS feeds have wider reach. I’ve found that it’s worth the extra money to appear in both versions – ask your favorite publisher for details. For publications that allow this, it’s normally only 20% extra Save money by retaining visitors You’ve probably heard a thousand times that it is easier to sell repeatedly to an existing client than it is to find a new one. So how do you get that visitor to come back, and possibly buy again? A constant stream of new information on a particular topic work is enough to keep people buying a daily newspaper, subscribing to a magazine or viewing a television series. Frequent updates can work the same way for your site. With bloggers being named People of the Year by Time magazine last year, if you’re not blogging in 2005, you’re going to be left in the dust by other sites in your industry that do. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of extra time, and the time it does takes is made up for in the money you can save.

Why Wordpress Blogs is better than Blogger Blogs

The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn't yet support.

Number 1, you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you'll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that "grunge" work for you automatically.

Number 2, Wordpress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and for the search engines.

Let's say the topic of your site is Widgets. You could create a Category for black widgets, one for orange widgets, and one for green widgets.

Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by Category.

So if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, they can easily find all your posts on green widgets. They don't have to go through your entire archives to find them. With a blog that has been around for awhile and has hundreds of posts, that would be pretty discouraging. Using Categories makes it very easy.

Categories are also very search engine friendly. When you use Categories in your blog, there is a link on every one of your pages to your categories. Think about this: would you rather be #1 in the search engines for March 2003, or for green widgets, one of the main keywords of your site?

By using the Category feature, you will eventually have hundreds of pages on your site with links to green widgets, black widgets, and orange widgets. All those backlinks to those keywords can result in much higher search engine rankings.

Another neat feature is that you can easily create an RSS feed for each of your categories. Then every time you post to your blog, it could be pinging the Blog/RSS directories for each feed!

Compare that to putting up a new page on a traditional website. Even if the search engines find your new page right away, it might be a month or two before it actually gets indexed and starts drawing traffic. It might be a long time before it enjoys a first page position for its keywords.

It's almost amazing how easy all this is with a well-structured blog like Wordpress with Categories enabled!

What is the need of Blog and RSS

If you've been under a rock for the last year or so it's
possible you might not have heard about blogs and RSS feeds.
If you're like most of us, you've heard the buzz but might
not've known what to make of it or what to do with it.
Here's some answers.

First RSS feeds. RSS, depending on who you ask, stands for
Really Simple Syndication. This is a technology that enables
you to bring fresh, constantly updated material (feeds) into
your site. The attraction of this is obvious. Sites need
content, the fresher the better. Search engines love new
content, hence the excitement about being able to pipe in
extremely targeted feeds directly into your site. The
implementation of this is not as difficult as one might
imagine, and the choices for content are ever-burgeoning.
You can find a feed for almost anything, and if you can't,
you can create your own and syndicate it all over the web.
The possibilities are mind-boggling. End-users must have the
capability to read these feeds, but there are free feed
readers all over the place and the new generation of
browsers will have this built in.

Blogs. Nominated as one of the top words of 2004, they were
prominent in the election (can you say, or want to, Howard
Dean?) and they have become more a of web-household item.
Blog software is ridiculously easy to use, and free. But why
do I need one, you ask. Well, for me, it boils down to one
thing and one thing only: search engines love blogs!! I have
blogs that have higher (and much more quickly acquired)
PageRank than sites that have several hundred pages of
content! Why is this? Think about it: the very thing search
engines love most, fresh content, is the very nature of
blogging. Most blogs, at least commercial ones, are very on
topic, keyword oriented, and frequently updated. The
marketing piece concerning blogs is still in it's infancy
but growing fast. There is little more powerful these days
than a content blog hosted on your own site that is updated
daily. I have blogs that get more traffic than the site they
are sitting on! Think about this. It'll be worth it!

Blogs and RSS feeds are the next big thing that's already
here! Don't miss out on the possibilities they offer!

How to start a business blog?

The new hot commodity is a blog for your small business so you've decided you must have one.

Before you begin think about it long term. Where do you think
the blog is headed? What is the objective? Do you want it to be
found by the search engines for specific terms? How often
will you post? Who will the audience be? What will it look like
a year from now? Five years from now?

If you think you may have this blog for a long time, consider
hosting it with your own domain name. Blogger provides you
with a free domain name (name.blogspot.com), or the option
of ftp to your own domain. If, at some point in time in the
future you want to move the blog and you've been using the
blogspot name, you won't be able to take it with you. This means
that all of the people who have your blog in their reader will
"lose" you. It also means that you'll have to start from ground
zero with the search engines.

Do some digging before you jump. A couple of good networks
where you can get some education are:

- Blogging for Business at http://blogbrandz-network.ryze.com/
Make sure you sign up for the "Blogging for Marketers" email course. Priya has loaded the course with good blog information (and it costs you nothing).

- Blogger Forum at http://www.bloggerforum.com/modules/newbb/
The Blogger Forum is very welcoming to newbies. Browse around
and just by looking at previous posts, you can learn a ton. they also have a section on blog platforms which talks about the different options available.

Once you're ready to go, what are you going to write about? Make sure you've brainstormed ideas so you don't run into the inevitable writer's block. You can always start with what you've written before. Do you have a newsletter? Look through your archive and "refresh" some of those old topics as a blog posting. How about your website? Do you have content you can turn into a blog topic? Do you participate in online forums or discussion lists? Find some advice you gave to someone there and turn it into a blog post.

This should get you started. Remember that small business blogging is a long term activity. Be ready.

How get started a blog?

I put off starting a blog for a long time because I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be technical. I thought I'd have to install scripts and tear my hair out getting them to work. At that point, most of what I'd read about blogs and RSS was just so much geek-speak.

Was I ever wrong!

When I finally got the courage to give it a go, I went to blogger.com and signed up for an account. To my amazement, I had a blog set up in about 5 minutes. My first post was uploaded to my site about 10 minutes later.

The only thing even remotely technical I was required to do was enter the FTP settings for the website my blog would be published on. But even that wasn't a requirement. With Blogger, you can set up a blog on their site, Blogspot, and not even worry about FTP settings.

Since then, I've started 3 Blogger blogs on different sites. Blogger remains one of the most popular blog applications in the world simply because it is so simple to use and set up. If you're a technophobe or don't have the time to learn something completely new, I would urge you to drop by Blogger.com and take a look. You could be blogging - and enjoying the benefits - almost immediately.

Another very simple blogging tool is Wordpress. This blog is my first Wordpress blog, and I'm very impressed with how powerful it is - as well as simple.

Wordpress is installed on your own website, but don't let that stop you. Most hosts that have Cpanel already have Wordpress ready for you to install. Look in your Cpanel for the Fantastico application, click it open, and then choose Wordpress to install. It will automatically install it on your site for you, and you can start blogging right away.

If your host doesn't already include Wordpress in the scripts on your server, you can still pick it up at:

http://wordpress.org/

Then go to the Wordpress Wiki for instructions on how to install it in 5 minutes:

http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=5MinuteInstallation

Wordpress is free, open-source software. It is very simple to install, even for technophobes, and has a lot of online documentation. There are also many sites with free Wordpress add-ons and templates. I'm using a template for this blog that I picked up at Alex King's site:

http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/styles.php

The Wordpress Wiki is a wealth of information on all things Wordpress, including installation instructions, help files, a long list of template sites, and all kinds of hacks and extras you can use to modify your blog and make it original.

If you're a Wordpress user, another place to visit is the Wordpress discussion forum:

http://wordpress.org/support/

If you're a new blogger, both Wordpress and Blogger are very user friendly. There isn't a long learning curve. And you won't have to learn any new technical tricks. Why not give one of them a try?

Easy tricks to build traffic to your blog

With the growing interest in blogging as a means of online promotion and branding, a lot of marketers are starting blogs to promote their opinions, products, books and services. But a blog is like a website. "Write and they will come" isn't exactly a magic formula to bring in traffic by the boatload.

If you need to promote your website in order to build traffic to it, you need to promote your blog as well.

Here are some ways you can become a well-read and influential blogger.

1. Write Posts That People Will Want To Read

This should be common sense, but many marketers tend to forget that their readers are real people and that you need to use the principles of online copywriting to make your headlines and copy interesting to your readers.

If you write posts that people enjoy reading, they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly.

Make your posts conversational, pithy and topical. Keep them short and stick to one topic per post.

Write often and regularly so that both readers and search engines visit your blog more often.

2. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

I cover this topic in detail in my article on "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs" http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-seo.htm

But here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.

* Make sure your blog URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for

* Use your primary keywords in the title of your post

* Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

* Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts

3. Submit Your Blog and RSS Feed To Directories

If you publish a blog you should submit your blog and RSS feed to big directories like Yahoo and Dmoz, as well as the numerous blog directories and search engines.

Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog, compiled by Luigi Canali De Rossi, who writes under the pseudonym Robin Good.

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Another list of sites to submit your Blog.
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

4. Ping The Blog Services

There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you've updated your blog so they can come check you out.

Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic ping results page so you can visit it and quickly ping a number of services with a single click.
http://pingomatic.com

5. Build Links To Your Blog

I recommend the methods here as the best ways to get links pointing to your blog

* Link to your blog from each page on your main website

* Trackback to other blogs in your posts

* Post legitimate comments on other blogs with related topics

* Offer to exchange links with other similarly themed blogs and websites

6. Edit Your Blog Posts Into Articles

One of the best methods for promoting your website is to write articles and submit them to article directories.

The suggestion for extending this to edit your blog posts into articles and submit them to directories came from the coach at "Explode Blog Traffic" who also has other noteworthy suggestions at his blog here.
http://bloghit.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-to-explode-blog-traffic.html

You'll find an extensive list of article directories here
http://www.articlewritingtips.com/submit-articles.htm

7. Create Buzz About Your Blog

Creating a buzz about your blog posts and topic in the local and online media will give your marketing a viral component.

* Create a controversy around your blog or it's topic.

* Distribute bumper stickers or other merchandise with your blog's URL and tagline.

* Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic.

8. Capture Subscribers By Email

It may seem strange for a blogger to send out updates by email, but email is still the #1 choice of most people who want to receive news and information.

Using a free service like Bloglet to manage your subscriptions is easy and it allows your subscribers to manage all their subscriptions from one interface. http://www.bloglet.com

However, if you want more control over your list and don't mind mailing out the updates yourself, you can use an autoresponder system to capture and follow-up with subscribers.

RSS responder is a new script that allows you to keep in touch and follow-up with your subscribers without the hassle of email. Find it and more RSS tools here
http://www.rssnewssite.com

These tips should give you a good start to building your blog traffic.

Tips to build backlinks with blogs

The most boring part of getting traffic to a website is
getting backlinks. This is hard, boring, time consuming
work. You spend hours finding relevant websites to link to,
then spend hours more sending emails requesting backlinks,
or submitting your sites to there links pages. And at the
end of the day (actually in a few weeks), you have ½ a dozen
new reciprocal link partners. that's good and all, but it
bores the living hell out of me, and I don't have time for
it. And they are only reciprocal links.

One-way links

Far better are one way links back to your pages. These are
from websites that link to your site without you having to
reciprocate. They are the best links to have, and the best
way to get them in the past has been by submitting articles
to places like directories, ezines and forums where other
people read them, and hopefully give you a link back on
there website somewhere.

Using a blog you can build one-way links to your site very
fast. If you write articles of interest to others, they will
link back to you in articles they write on their own blogs,
and bloggers link to other bloggers without even thinking.

Getting your blog seen

"OK, so how do I get my blog in front of other people?" you
ask... you automatically submit your blog posts to the large
blog and feed directories as soon as you publish them,
that's how! Included in your blog software is the ability to
ping other feed sites. At SEO-easy.com you can find a free
list of 45 directories to add to your Blog, so you can ping
them automatically every time you update your blog.

If your blogging software doesn't have the ability to
automatically ping, go to Pingomatic.com and submit your
blog manually.

Where to put your blog

On your website, that's where. If your blog is hosted
outside your website... on blogger.com for instance, move
it! You can't get backlinks with your blog if unless it's on
a page of your website. The other option is using WordPress
or a similar blog package.

WordPress is fast becoming the most popular blogging
software in use today. It is included as a free download in
with many hosting accounts. Go into your servers admin and
look for Fantastico Scripts and it should be there. If your
hosting includes cPanel, you will find it is included, all
you need to do is install it, and that takes only a minute.
If your hosting does not include it, you can download and
install it from WordPress.org yourself.

You can place your blog on your homepage - yoursite.com - on
another page of your site - yoursite.com/blog - on a
subdomain - blog.yoursite.com - but in my opinion, by far
the best is yoursite.com

Reasons why the marketers publish a blog

If there is a downside to blogging, I have yet to find it. The
more you learn about blogging, the more there is to like.

In fact, here are 6 mouth-watering reasons why every marketer
should be blogging:

1- Fast Search Engine Spidering and Indexing of Your Site:

Did you know that Google owns the most popular blogging platform
on the planet? Blogger at http://www.blogger.com is used to
produce thousands of blogs. Even a complete internet newbie can
set up a blog in about 5 minutes at Blogger. And guess who can be
counted on to come by and quickly spider all those new blog posts
as they are written?

Yahoo is also embracing blogs and feeds in a big way. Savvy
marketers know that adding their blogs and feeds to their MyYahoo
page can bring the Yahoo spider to their site almost immediately.

One of the reasons that blogs get spidered so quickly is that
most of them produce a feed. Many blogs automatically "ping" (or
notify) some of the large sites that carry these feeds and make
them available for syndication. Search engines spider these sites
many times a day. Blogger, for instance, pings Weblogs every time
you make a post. You can also "ping" a free site called
Pingomatic (http://www.pingomatic.com) every time you add a new
blog post. Your ping will notify Yahoo and 11 other large feed
sites that you've added a post. If it only were so easy to get
Google to notice new pages on regular sites!

If you have a new site that you are having trouble getting
indexed, adding a blog or RSS feed is one of the quickest ways to
get the spiders to come calling.

2-Blogs can Build Your Backlinks Quickly:

If you've spent time trying to get reciprocal links to your site,
you know how frustrating, boring, and time-consuming it can be.
I've long considered reciprocal link building to be one of the
worst ways to develop link popularity. Many SEO experts consider
one-way links to be far more effective.

A blog can build one-way links to your site fast. If you've just
started a blog, you should submit it to the large blog and feed
directories. Here is a list of the Top 55:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Once you've submitted your blog to these directories, you'll find
your backlinks growing quickly. This past year, more webmasters
are using RSS feeds on their sites to keep their sites fresh and
spidered frequently. Software applications such as RSS Equalizer,
Express RSS, and CARP make this easy.

After starting my first blog, I was amazed at how many different
sites carried my feed with a link back to my site! These links
can multiply exponentially over time.

Now tell me something. Wouldn't you rather be spending your time
adding content to your site than trying to get questionable
reciprocal links? Especially when it doesn't take any extra time?

3-A Frequently Updated Blog will Keep the Spiders Visiting Your
Site Often:

Most of us are aware that the search engines like sites that are
updated frequently. If you have your blog set up correctly, every
post will update several pages of your site. Then pinging Yahoo
and the blog and feed directories at Pingomatic can bring out the
spiders in just a few hours. This is a great way to get new pages
of your site indexed quickly and frequently.

4-Your Site is Stickier and More Appealing to Visitors:

A blog on your site is an easy way to keep your site updated on a
regular basis. The upside is that visitors will come by more
often. If they find your blog interesting and informative, they
may bookmark your site. That means you have a much greater chance
of making sales. And you have a ready-made audience for any new
products you launch.

A blog can also add a human face to your website that potential
customers will trust and respond to. Most marketers know that
people buy from people they like and respect. A well-written blog
is a great way to build a relationship with your visitors.

5-A Blog Is The Fastest And Easiest Way To Build A Brand-New
Website Without Training:

Even a 10 year old could set up a blog at Blogger.com and be
blogging almost immediately. No HTML knowledge is necessary. You
don't need to know how to FTP. You don't need to know how to link
the pages in your site together. All you have to do is type in
your post and click on the "publish" button. And yet you can
still set up an attractive, spiderable site in record time.

Blogs can be used for any type of site, not just for online ezine
delivery or a place to announce new products. Using a blog you
could quickly build a niche site. Just research the best keywords
for your niche. Then write articles around those keywords and
post them to your blog. Include your keywords in your title. You
now have an instant niche site that will be spidered quickly and
be easy to maintain.

6-Keyword competition in RSS feed sites is much less than in the
SE's:

Google, Yahoo, and MSN each have many millions of webpages in
their indexes. It can be almost impossible to get top rankings
for competitive keywords if you don't have a high PR site with
lots of backlinks.

It's a completely different story at the RSS feed sites. The
competition for many high-competition keywords is almost
nonexistent. Setting up a blog in some of these high-competition
niches is a good way to successfully compete.

Marketers spend a lot of time and money getting traffic to their
sites, creating backlinks, getting good SE rankings, and building
relationships with their customers. A blog can improve your
results in all those areas. There aren't very many free marketing
techniques that can make that claim!

Business blogging tips to help you Smashl through Writer's Block

It’s inevitable. Everyone hits the wall. Whether you’ve been blogging ten weeks, ten minutes, or ten months, eventually you’ll find yourself with absolutely nothing to say. Or so you think. So what in the world do you do when you’re stumped? 1- Talk about what you’ve already talked about Pick a topic you’ve gone over before and give it some spin. Try a new angle, like playing devil’s advocate. For example, if you are a search engine journalist, and last week your position was that most mainstream sites need Google traffic to survive, try proving your point from the “con” perspective, instead of the “pro” position. There are dozens of ways to write about the same thing. By putting your point another way, you might give someone in your audience what a client of mine referred to as an “Ah-ha!” moment. That's when they realize the true value of the items for sale at your site to them and their business. 2- Talk about what someone else is talking about If you want to have a popular blog, find other bloggers in similar areas, and talk about what they said in their posts. Friendly debate can often spark the soap-opera like drama that will have both your audiences visiting both blogs to see what “the other fella” had to say. As an added bonus, if both of you are using Trackback in your blogs, you’ve got yourself a mini-link party that other people who are speaking on similar topics will want to join.. 3- Have yourself a good rant The intimate nature and voice of blogs lends itself well to the opinionated, angry ramble. But as a professional, don’t let yourself get too unfocused, and remember to back up your opinion with facts. 4- Feature someone, something or somewhere I like to call mine “of the Day”. As I zip around the Net conducting my business and research, if my attention is called to a resource or tool that my audience might find useful, I hit my blog bookmarklet and save that bad boy for later. Then when I get too busy for a full blown tip, I’ll crown the resource, feed, tool, download or freebie the featured “Deal of the Day”, changing the word deal to something else more appropriate as needed. After a while, my audience started to look for it as a feature, as opposed to being upset at the interruption in my mad, mad rambles. 5- Let someone else talk for a change Invite a guest blogger, or post an article that offers free reprint rights, the same way you would in a newsletter. Of course you want to leave the resource box intact, or let the guest promote their site, which brings me to the most common complaint about this tactic. “But I don’t want to send people away from my site.” Guess what? You’ll never believe what I found out. Ready? In a recent startling discovery, I’ve found that 100% of my visitors eventually turn off their computers or take otherwise drastic measures that cause them to leave my site. Apparently this is beyond prevention, though you can stall them for hours sometimes with good content. Of course you don’t want to send them on their way prematurely, but if you’re a good blogger, and have done what you can to make sure they sign up to your blog email updates or site feed, they’ll be back. Just be sure that you’re giving them a good enough reason. In the meantime, since they’re going to leave anyway, it might as well be somewhere that gives you some direct or in-direct benefit. So there you have it - enough material for five more days of posts. Happy Blogging!

How to write a Blog and make it Famous

The question of the day is "Should you start a Blog?"

People all over the planet are blogging. Companies, CEOs, lawyers, journalists, stewardesses. Even dogs and babies.

Why? Because they can. It's that simple.

Blogging requires little or no learning curve. If you can type, speak into a phone, bark, chew, record a holiday movie, you can blog.

Blogs have taken publishing out of the domain of those who know HTML and designing, to make this powerful tool available to the rest of us.

That holiday in the Far East, your grandma's birthday, you company's latest product offering, your new recipe for rum cake, your daughter's first step, your pet's antics, what you thought of the Garfield movie - you can blog all this and more.

A blog is an online journal or diary. Which makes it ideal for voicing your opinion, recording your pregnancy blahs or announcing your company's latest acquisition.

People are using them to communicate with family, for education, for business, and almost anything else you can think of.

But one thing not all blogs get is a readership.

Unless your blog is only for your family or your business colleagues, you're probably writing with the hope that someone will read about what you think.

So many blogs are started with little or no purpose. If you want to blog and survive, first start by answering your why.

If you're writing only for the search engine spiders, then be prepared for no one but them to read your keyword-rich spam.

Blogs demand a readership. And for that you have to write about something worth reading.

Here are some tips to follow if you want human beings to read your blogs.

1. Stay on topic

Opinions are fine, but unless you're the CEO of Microsoft, very few people will want to know what you ate for breakfast. If you started your blog to air your raves and rants about the latest movie you saw, better mention movies in at least every post you write.

2. Write in a conversational tone

Forget what your English professor taught you. Write the way you speak, or you'll end up sounding uptight and unnatural. And no one reads tight copy... even from the CEO of Microsoft.

3. Be opinionated

Your blog is not a company brochure or a press release, but a way for people a.k.a. your target audience, to get to know the real you. The worst sin you can commit is to bore your readers. Most people respond better to an honest airing of views than pleasant platitudes. And if you get a few rude or nasty comments in response to your posts, just accept the fact that you can't please everyone

4. Be funny

Infuse your posts with your natural wit for a better response from your target audience. And if not everyone appreciates your particular brand of humor, read the last sentence in the point above.

5. Stay informed

If you're writing about your profession, you'd better know what you are talking about. Word spreads at the speed of thought in the blogospere and if you're trying to become an authority on something you know very little of, prepare yourself for the brickbats.

6. Stay current

Write about the latest developments in your field. No one wants to read stuff that has been around for a long time, or that hundreds of other bloggers have chronicled.

7. Update frequently, but don't burnout

Most blogs die because of blogger burnout - bloggers trying to update too frequently. Stick to a publishing schedule that is humanly possible for you. If you've just updated your blog and find a story you want to share, save it for later.

On the other hand, don't post just because you think you have to stick to a schedule. Going a few days or even weeks without posting is fine if you really have nothing worth sharing.

So are you still wondering if you should blog?

If you think you can meet the requirements above, and know your why, then like the shoe people say - just do it.

Blogging for easy dollars

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger's focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google's spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

Definition : blogs, what is blogs?

It seems like Blogs are everywhere these days. You can't seem to surf the Internet without seeing the word Blog somewhere. The intent of this article is to explain the basics what a Blog is and how you can use them to help promote your business and gain valuable information quicker that surfing the Internet.

The word Blog is short for web log. Basically a Blog is just an area set aside you to write articles that can easily be accessed with a special program called a RSS reader. In case you're wondering RSS stands for real simple syndication.

When you set up a Blog you select a template that will house your information. Once you have the Blog set up you can post whatever information you like. It's really a fast way to get your articles and information up on the web and the templates look great! You don't have to mess with all the technical end of getting something up on a web page (HMTL layout, FTP, ect...). The real cool thing about Blogs is that you can get the software to read them for free. Also, you can set up an account and create your own Blog for free!

One thing I should note is, you can read Blogs with your standard browser and post comments on the content of the Blog. An optional way to read Blogs is by using a RSS reader program. You simply subscribe to whichever Blogs that you want to and they are available immediately in the reader. Personally I like to use the reader because you have all of the Blogs that your interested in one place and you don't have surf all over the Internet to read them.

The free reader that I use can be downloaded here: http://www.rsspublisher.com/.
To get your very own free Blog, which you can post to go to: http://www.blogger.com/start.
I think you will find that they are very easy to set up and post to.

The are many advantages that Blogs offer over a web site or ezine.

1. You don't have to mess with an HTML layout. You just post your info and the info looks wonderful because the Blog uses the template that you set up.

2. You can post as often as you like. I can't imagine that I would send an email to my ezine every day but with a Blog you can post as much as you would like.

3. Email spam filters do not block Blogs because they are not an email communication.

4. You can make as many Blogs as you like on any subject.

I hope this will help you start your own Blog and officially start you down the road to being a Blogger!

Reasons to publish a Newsletter and a Blog

With spam filters on high alert, delivering a newsletter by email is not as easy as it was even one year ago. Should it reach your subscriber's inbox (without getting siphoned into a junk folder), it still has to vie for attention amongst dozens – or even hundreds – of new messages.

1. A blog is not "email"

A Weblog or blog, on the other hand, is a page on your site that can be updated several times a week with fresh content. If a reader has “subscribed” to your blog, he or she gets an alert (consisting of the headline and brief summary) every time you post new information.

I.e., much the same way you can include a teaser paragraph in your e-newsletter with a link back to the full article on your site.

If you're thinking that subscribers have to proactively "visit" your blog (a "pull" tactic) vs. having an ezine or e-newsletter delivered to them (a "push" approach) there's good news.

You can subscribe to a blog using downloadable software called a newsreader. NewsGator www.newsgator.com is a popular one as it integrates seamlessly with Outlook. There are lots of newsreaders to choose from, many of them free. Once installed on your desktop, the newsreader (also called a news aggregator) grabs the latest updates to your blog via an RSS feed.

No need to worry what RSS is (it stands for Really Simple Syndication). Just have faith that RSS is a new way to publish and distribute content on the Web without using email. And that’s the point. No email. So, no worries about spam filters or delivery problems.

2. A blog is an instant publishing tool

A blog is an easy-to-use content management tool. When you “blog,” you are instantly adding new content to your site via a Web interface. No technical or programming skills are necessary. Anyone can update the copy and content on your site. In fact, think of a blog as just another page on your Web site.

Key point: a blog doesn't have to be “cool.” A steady stream of short tips with links to other sites or articles can be extremely useful. (See my article 5 tips for a useful resource blog.) In fact, this is the same kind of useful information you may be cramming into each issue of your newsletter. With a blog, you can parcel it out in digestible bits - with more impact.

3. A blog makes your site search engine friendly

Search engines love blogs and will index individual entries (no matter how short) if you've got your blogging software configured to create a separate page for each new post. In other words, think of each blog post or entry as a Web page with its own title.

By incorporating a blog into your site you are creating multiple new mini pages. Search engines crawl sites which are updated regularly with fresh content. So “blogging” raises your site’s rankings in search results.

OK, but are blogs a fad or a trend?

I love this question. Here's my answer:

Newsletters or ezines are still the e-vehicle of choice for most marketers. Two things are slowing the adoption of blogs as a channel for business communication:

1. The term blogging is associated with online journals; personal, unedited writing; and, er, needless bloviating.

2. Most folks don't know what a news reader is and why you need one to subscribe to a blog or any other RSS feed. (Again, don’t fret over RSS. Visit www.newsgator.com for a good explanation and to see how easy it is to download a newsreader.)

Use a blog to extend the reach of your e-newsletter

My advice for now is to continue publishing an e-newsletter. If you're sending it in HTML, trim your design down to the bare minimum and make the file size as small as possible. This will give you a better chance of getting past the spam filters and other blocking tools being used by major ISPs like AOL.

Of course, don't forget to link back to your blog through each issue of your e-newsletter. You'll probably need to explain to your newsletter readers what your blog is, where to find it and how to subscribe to it.

If you think your email subscribers are not ready to embrace “newsreaders,” then don’t mention this downloadable software - or RSS for that matter. Simply include a prominent link to your blog in the layout of your newsletter and remind readers to “visit” often for updates between issues.

Bottom line, consider adding a blog to your site for two reasons: as an instant publishing tool and as an adjunct to your email marketing efforts. You may find you can use a blog to trim down the extraneous information that's clogging the regular issues of your newsletter and making it less effective.

Tips for business blogs

Lemmings are cute, but dumb. If you tell them to jump off a cliff, they will. Just like the people who start blogs because everyone is doing it. Guess what happens after a little while? The blogs die.

In managing a list of many Web sites, most of which are blogs, I deleted countless sites from the list because the sites and blogs no longer existed. The people ran out of steam or had no reason to start them in the first place.

How do you know when a blog is right for your business? Learn why people start blogs, how they find their niche and how blogging tools can be used for more than blogs.

Some people like to read blogs, others like to read newsletters, still others like to rely on feeds and some read a few or all of them. No matter the method the information is distributed, each medium has one thing in common: content. Having a blog connects your newsletter and your business with all of these readers and delivers important content in a particular style.

I've been blogging since June 2000. If you review my early blog entries in meryl's notes, you'll notice they're more personal. When blogs first hit the scene in the late '90s, they were personal diaries and journals. Like the blog business, my blog has transformed from personal to business speak, although I still add personal notes here and there.

A few bloggers tend to talk about their work, their products and their little world. That might work for celebrities where fans want to know everything about them, but it doesn't work for the average business person. Other business people want information on how to succeed and when a blog spends time hawking products offering information of no value, few people will return. The people whose products sell well are the ones who provide valuable information. Readers already know what kind of information they're getting, so they trust that when they buy something, it will be of the same or better quality. This value must be reflected in their blog. It's much like people who only sign up for a newsletter after first seeing an example.

No one wants to be a lemming (I would hope). How do you decide whether or not to set up a blog? The answer isn't black or white (what did you expect?). Ask these questions:

• Can you regularly update it — at least five times a week?
• Do you have something to say other than just linking to others?
• Do you read other blogs or feeds?
• Can you provide information of value to others not just to yourself?
• How large is your newsletter subscriber list?
• How many unique visitors do you get on an average day, week or month?

The big decider is whether or not you can write in the blog almost daily. The people behind the high traffic blogs post multiple times a day. Though resourceful, merely linking to other sites doesn’t give visitors much reason to make the effort to come to yours. Reading other blogs or feeds is a great way to learn how to carry a discussion. Find other blogs covering topics similar to yours and check them out. Disagree with their opinions? Write about it and explain your reasons. Cross-blog discussions are common, and that's where trackback comes in handy.

Trackback is a blog feature. If you decide to comment on another blog posting in your blog instead of in that blog's comments page, then you link to the conversation through the trackback link. Trackback is similar to the permalink, the permanent URL for the blog entry, but it has a different URL for copying and pasting in your blog's trackback box.

Aside from the technical aspects of operating a blog on a daily basis, subscriber list size and Web site traffic are good indicators of what kind of reaction you'll get when opening a blog. Starting from scratch with little traffic means you have a long road ahead and lots of work to do. There is no magic formula anyone can sell you for $97 to make your blog an overnight success. But with some perseverance and ingenuity, your blog can engage many prospects and clients.

Considering there are numerous blogs out there, pick a niche topic when starting a blog for a better shot at attracting and keeping an audience. meryl's notes focuses on three areas: webby, geeky and wordy. In reality, this is too much. What I need to do for my readers is create three separate blog entry points, so those interested in writing, newsletters and Internet marketing get nothing but the wordy entries. Those interested in Web design get the webby stuff and the technophiles receive the geeky content.

I also manage a personal blog separate from meryl's notes. It's about cochlear implants and deafness. This could fall under the geeky category, but it's a personal blog and doesn't belong in meryl's notes. This blog is written for a different audience.

The blogging tools for both of my blogs come with syndication capabilities so those using feed readers or aggregators can read the content through the software. When sending a new issue of a newsletter, comment on it or link to it in the blog, that way the blog and feed readers will get the goods, so all three bases are covered.

Blogging tools aren't just for, well, blogging. Such tools are an excellent way to help you update your Web site more often than you otherwise would. I use it to manage the list of tableless Web sites. Using blogging tools is much easier than the way I managed it before, updating the HTML files by hand. Though using a blog tool, it isn't a blog. In this case, the blog tool has become a content management system (CMS).

Small business owners don't have a need for the fancy and pricey CMSes out there. They find it easier to use blogging software to manage their sites or hire someone to adapt the tool for their site.

Blogs have found a place in businesses and people are finding creative ways to use them. Some companies have a blog on the intranet for communicating project status, jeopardies and metrics. They’re used for knowledge management. With information pouring in, blog tools provide a way to share, organize and process the information.

Being a follower can be good or bad. No one wants to walk off a cliff with the lemmings, but everyone wants to succeed. Best practices won't help, since the decision to blog is based on the organization's mission, needs and goals along with its target market's desires and needs. A blog about lemmings? There is one, sort of. Or maybe you’d like to start your own and talk about dumb business moves.