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Blogging For Money- Free Assistive Hint For Online Money

If your major interest is information related to blogging for money or any other such as globe of blogs, Paris blog sites, free blog com or best sports blog, this article can prove useful.

Now that you are beginning to get familiar with your niche you will be researching and learning more and more. Then you may begin to compose your knowledge and share it with others in the form of articles.

Use real world applications to prove to your readers the expert advice or information you’re passing on. Given that most of your blog postings are going to be 100% test try to assist your readers “visualize” the benefit of heeding your advice by displaying a real world example or actual application that you or one of your existing clients have encountered. Try for the “Hey, man, that would solve our problem, too” reaction from your reader.

Save the long words for your doctoral dissertation. We know you are smart, we know you have a nice vocabulary, but we don’t want to read “magnanimous” when “noble” will do. Keep it simple.

As detailed as this article is, don’t forget that you can find more information about blogging for money or any such information from any of the search engines out there such as MSN. Commit yourself to finding specific information therein about blogging for money, and you will.

Blog networks are groups of Web publisher blogs formed into a network. There can be half a dozen, or hundreds, depending on the ambitions and interests of the owner of the network. Blog networks usually derive their income from advertising.

The final stage is to actually drive traffic to your site! If you’re web logging for money, then you’re going to need actual visitors to assist make your blog an active cash machine. Getting traffic to any website is an art in itself, and there are many methods you can try out. One free method you can use is to post in related internet forums and message boards with a link to your blog in your forum signature. Another method is to submit articles to directories which, again, have a link to your blog.

Making money web logging really is easy in technical execution, so much so that even a relative technophobe could do it. The real key is to attract enough targeted traffic to your blog regularly to ensure that you’re getting the hits on your affiliate links and Google Adsense advertising. You’ll find plenty of advice on how to charge traffic to blogs through internet forum searches. Just be persistent and display a willingness to learn.

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Blogging Advice- Free Useful Guidepost For Bloggers

If you are searching for information related to blogging advice or any other such as digital photography for beginners, photography blog, road rules blog or create your blog you have come to the right article. This piece will provide you with not just general blogging advice information but also specific and helpful information. Enjoy it.

Your commissions should be reinvested into PPC ads and e-zine advertising, especially solo ads. The urge to get your own domain name and hosting may start to grow and this is strongly urged. However, if you choose to remain on Blogger like me then no problem; it’s not what you have, but what you do with it that counts.

If you had to ask yourself “what is web logging”, you probably are not aware that you can make money from it as well. Many people start blogs as a way to make money. The best way to do this is by signing up for a Google adsense account. This has been proven as one of the best ways of making money with a blog. When you sign up for an account, Google will place targeted ads on your blog that will earn you money every time somebody visits your site and clicks on them. So, if you have a lot of traffic on your blog you will definitely be able to make some extra money.

Another simpler and less expensive way to do and the way that I recommend are to write the content yourself. Writing content for an Adsense blog is not that difficult. All you really have to do is come up with some keywords you wish to target, develop some interesting titles around those keywords, and then start writing. This method takes time, efforts, and a little of dedication but the long term pay off is immeasurable.

If as related to blogging advice as this article is, and it still doesn’t answer all your needs, then don’t forget that you can conduct more searches on any of the major search engines like Google to get more helpful blogging advice information.

In the sales model, you devote a blog to a single product, or range of products. When offline companies start blogs, their blogs are sales blogs - they’re using their blogs to sell their products. If you have products that you want to sell, a sales blog is an excellent business model. You could sell a product that you’ve created - an ebook, a DVD, or art work - or products that you buy from others, and resell.

The Internet is the essence of marketing, by that I mean, every word in an ad matters, every color, where the ad is located on your blog, whether it is blinking or not, and the color of the text. It might not seem like all of those things matter, but the fact is, everything that you decide matters. The good thing is you can experiment with how your blog looks as much as you want. There are several e-books written on how you should place and where you should place them, in the beginning, just go with the basic blog setup until you get the hang of things.

When you use a web log as the platform for your newsletter or e-zines, you can post each of your promotions to the web, and then invite your subscribers to your blog to view your most recent update. When readers follow the link from your email to your latest blog post, they will not only have the opportunity to respond to the current promotion, they will be able to browse through your blog and act on offers you made last week, last month, even last year.

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4 Helpful Hints For Starting A Successful Blog

Starting a blog is a great idea. They can be really fun and enjoyable from day one. Often times blogs can be created with minimal monetary investment (how does $0 sound?) and almost no commitment on your part. If you write every day, great. If you write every day for a week and never do so again that is just fine too. Your blog can always be deleted if you no longer find it worth your while.

Blogs can also help supplement your income if you chose to monetize them. It is amazing how advertising works, but people will pay you to place links on your site in the hope that someone will click on it and generate a sale for them. This can be a win-win-win for you, the customer, and the advertiser since you get a little money, the customer gets the product or service they were looking for, and the advertiser finds the customer they are seeking to serve.

There are many very good resources out there on how to start a blog. Here are a few points I have found were particularly useful for me:

1. Choose a topic to write about that interest you. If you do this that means that you will always (well, not always - but most of the time) be willing to write something. If you like personal finance, start a personal finance blog. If you like parenting, start a parenting blog. If you political, religious, have a green thumb, like gadgets, or are totally into celebrities there will always be tons and tons for you to write about because there is always something going on in these areas.

2. Pick a blogging software that you feel most comfortable with. The major players are WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com), Blogger (http:///www.blogger.com), and TypePad (http://www.typepad.com). Each of these websites offers to let you start a blog on their domain for free - which can be a really nice way to get your feet wet in the blogging world without having to spend any money.

3. Read other blogs. There is so much to learn about blogging and one of the best ways to do that is to read other blogs. I would highly recommend reading blogs from a large section of the internet, not just your own particular niche. That way you can get many different perspectives and hear many different voices. You will be surprised how much you can learn from other people.

4. Make friends. Blogs can be very social and taking advantage of that aspect can really help you stick with it. Get to know other bloggers by leaving comments, engaging in discussions, and letting your opinions be heard. Another good way to do this is to link to other bloggers posts. This lets them know that you appreciate the content they create and that you are on friendly terms with them. If you also comment on their blogs you will definitely make a good impression on them, opening the door to being a blogging ‘friend.’

Give blogging a whirl. It is fun and enjoyable way to interact in the online world. You probably have ideas that can enrich the lives of those lucky enough to find your site and if your content enriches enough lives people will keep coming back to you to find exactly what you provide them. It is a great feeling know that you have a voice and your voice is heard.

Joe teaches people about Carlsbad auto insurance and the benefits of refurbished GPS.

Benefits of Building A Blog Opt-In List

Well for starters, it is FREE to have a blog. But why you have to choose to build a blog?
Not a normal website. Let’s read why.

A blog is basically your own website that you can use for whatever purpose you like. To talk about current event or your favorite topics, or you can use it to market and promote stuff.

You may heard that sometime Internet marketers call it niche marketing. It is all the same. More recently, people have been realizing the benefits of using their blogs to create an opt-in list.

The money truly is in the list, trust me! From a general quality list, you should be able to gain ROI as high as 1000% or more. And the ROI will continue increasing because when you have a better relationship with your list, you will be able to gain more.

All you have to do is set up your blog to have an email address form on it. Then, you write a short, informative report on the topic of your niche and offer it to your readers for FREE in exchange for their email address.

Simple, but it is so effective. Your readers (and future customers for life!) will type in their first name and email address into your auto-responder form (look up auto-responder if you are not familiar with what it is) in order to download your free report.

You’ll harvest their email addresses, you have begun building your blog opt-in list!

Now you have so many opportunities to make money with your list once you have built a responsive one.
Remember, your list does NOT have to be huge in order to make you a recurring income that you can live very comfortably off of.

It is all about the relationship you create/build with your list and the quality of the material that you give them (and also sell them).
An opt-in list is a vital and valuable asset for any business, especially online ones.

A blog is just a great tool for you to use to build your list. It’s free, it gets picked up easily by the search engines, it’s a wide used platform that you can find additional functionality easily and it looks professional!

To be able to build a list for FREE that can earn you literally millions of dollars is quite an incredible phenomenon and we should all be grateful for this great opportunity.

Do you want to set up your own Opt-in form on Wordpress in 5 minutes for FREE?

http://www.fasterinternetmarketing.com/FasterIM-OptIn/

Make Money Blogging - Do You Have What It Takes?

Lets face it starting a blog is fairly easy. There are thousands of we hosts out there who are ready and willing to offer you blogging services. Also you can use free hosting services such as Blogger or Wordpress. Many people start a blog with the intention of making income, but unfortunately they approach the game with a completely erroneous mindset.

There is an important element that must be understood, A blog is not a business. A blog is simply put a self promotional tool assisting you in making your business a success. Therefore thinking like a blogger is no good if your intention is to build income or in fact build a business. In order to earn significant income from blogging you have to start thinking like an entrepreneur. It is not enough just to be able to right compelling new content you have to look for ways of making this content pay.

I am running several blogging businesses at the moment, this one being my newest and really it is still a baby. Even though I have these businesses only around 20 percent of my time is spend writing new content. I guess your thinking to yourself what the hell is this guy doing with his time. It generally varies from week to week but I try and engage in all of the following

The most important people in anybodies business are the customers or potential customers. If you are blogging these are your visitors. I spend a lot of my time replying to emails or comments and attempting to contact new people within my niche. I have a blog based on a niche beauty treatment and have spent a lot of time communicating with a company about advertising a new skincare product. I would say the majority of my income comes through this channel. It is important to answer comments or emails from readers as these are the people you are trying to help, without them you do not have a business. This in my opinion should be a priority.

As mentioned above I spend a lot of time reviewing products, on this site I have already reviewed an e book which I though gave a great insight into affiliate marketing. I do not put everything on my site which I review, but if I find something which I think is honest and offers real quality I will usually offer it to my readers, sometimes with a discount. I will then take a reasonable commission from each sale. On my older blogs I can sometimes be put under quite a bit of pressure to review products but I will never review anything that I did not think would be of real benefit to my readers.

Just a quick example I had a request from a guy for this site just 2 days ago asking me to review his site which was based on credit management and showing people their way out of debt. I didnt go for it for 2 reasons 1 I didnt think my readers would connect with it 2 I felt the site lacked real quality and was mainly just a financial affiliate tool.

Figuring out What to Write, This plays a big part of my daily activities. I dont just pick a random topic I happen to know something about. I base a lot of what I write on comments or emails I have received. When I am starting a new blog I try and give a broad overview of what the topic will be based on concentrating on niches after the 6 month period.

Even though must of the writing I do is for the visitors I also have to consider the dreaded search spiders and give them a little something too. I spend time looking at keyword trends and seeing what I might be able to dominate on. For this blog anything around personal development or internet businesses will usually be where I start, however I have quite a few niche words I like to home in on.

I really dont use any particular tool even though I have tried quite a few. I really dont think you can beat Wordtracker if you really want to narrow down the most profitable keywords, but it is really up to you.

Whatever I write with the intention of building traffic and making visitors stick. This site already has an average visit time of 25 minutes which shows people who are visiting are really connecting with my content. I would never simply write for the search engines, even though if the free traffic comes it is very nice.

The most important thing is to give your visitors real quality, write article which they can apply in there life and really feel the benefit of them, not only will this increase your visitor loyalty it will also be a more fulfilling experience for you, as starting an online business should not just simply be about making money.

Building Links, Like any other website, in order to be noticed and receive traffic you have to get links to your site. It is an absolute must that you do this correctly. I spend a lot of time writing short articles, articles that give a taste of the information which can be found on this site. I try and write everyday and submit to article directories. This really has a three fold benefit.

Its helps me gain backlinks from relevant site, Increases my traffic, Helps me gain recognition for the expertise I can provide. I try and make my articles between 400 600 words long about half the size of the articles I write for this blog. I have to say that article marketing is one of the best ways to increase traffic and increase your PR. I use Article Marketer and find within 3 4 articles my page rank seems to increase, however this depends generally on the popularity of the keywords.

I also submit some of my favourite articles to social book marking sites and to blog carnivals, however this usually only in the early days of my blog until my traffic builds up. It is also a good habit to be part of the social network surrounding your topic this means you should make comments on other blogs. Remember youre not just looking for leads your looking to make an honest contribution to the discussion, if you do this you will gain more respect in your field and gain more visitors.

Blogger or Entrepreneur, This is what you now have to decide. Are you just going to be a good blogger. Are you going to create great content but have no real strategy to generating income from it. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but if your looking to gain income you have to be more strategic in your approach.

Dont get me wrong updating your content and making sure it is of sound quality is important but it is only part of the puzzle. You must have a plan for making sales or ultimately making money. A lot of bloggers do not know how to deal with the hidden complexities of making a substantial income from their blog. There are many aspects to deal with if you want to give your business and income longevity.

Decide what products meet your target audience and how you can pitch them. Do you want to make a product of your own. Do you want to advertise on your site What ever your plan is work your blog around it. Neither consumers or advertisers will not want to invest in a product which is only half right. Content does not generate income, just as a new electronic devise does not create sales. Marketing, pitching, reviewing and targeting are all needed to make any product sell.

Final Thoughts. Just before I finish up here I just want to extend a short word of warning. When people find out you are trying to create an online business there will be a certain amount of cynicism.

People will accuse of joining the dark side by trying to make a living from home. Peoples general perception is that it is a lazy way to make money when in reality it is anything but. Think of all the work you do to keep you content up to date, deal with the format of your site, promotion, article writing, researching, all this to give people the information they are searching for and to give them it with such quality requires tremendous effort and patience.

There are also those who do not understand the potential for making money online, do not understand the concept of blogging for money and accuse you of dreaming or wasting your time. I am here to tell you not to listen, because there are thousands of people out there all making money in exactly the same way as how I have described. YES you have to be patient, YES you have to work hard, but isnt having a job where you set your own hours, wake up and your there, create a substantial amount of income worth it. If not stick to the 9 5.

Visit How To Make Money Blogging, and get advice on work from home, online business and self development techniques. Tim is a success online entrepreneur and shares alll his no how free!

Tim
http://timgrice.blogspot.com/

How To Benefit From Blogging

If you already own a website you might want to consider turning a part of your website into a blog. A blog will help you make the most out of your web presence by offering your visitors daily or even weekly updates. By maintaining keeping your website visitors updated you will help your business running strong during hard months.

If you do not have a blog or website, starting a blog will help small business owners with little web design knowledge and a very small budget maintain a professional online presence.

Most web designers will charge less to design and install a new blog than they would charge to design and install a traditional html website. Blogging has already become extremely popular with many established businesses. Those who have not already started taking advantage are quickly noticing the changes.

Quite a few business owners have even began shutting down their traditional websites and replacing them with custom designed blogs. Those business owners that have not shut their traditional website have instead added blogs to be used to tell visitors about important updates or sales.

Before adding a blog your website or switching to a blog format, take the time to experiment with different blog platforms. Once you know more about blogging you will be able to decide whether or not blogging is right for your business. By starting out using blogging for personal news and updates you will be able to grow comfortable with the different blogging platform options and the benefits of running a blog on a professional level.

Many website owners have discovered that switching to a blog or adding a blog to their website will keep them from being at the mercy of their website designers. At some point or another business owners have needed a fast update to advertise a special event or sale. On many occasions web designers will not be able to complete an update for at least 24 hours. In some instances the update could take a week, costing your business valuable time and lost revenue. By using a blog your business will no longer be dependent upon a web designer.

Running a blog makes it possible for web site owners to take charge of when and how information is posted on their site. No more waiting on web designers to become available. Many business owners have found that their sales and traffic increased almost instantly when they were able to take charge of the information on their site. Visitors and potential clients were no longer shown the same, boring, information day after day. Now visitors are constantly exposed to new deals and information which will encourage them to visit your businesses website daily.

Blogs also give potential clients and readers a chance to interact with a business. They are able to comment on individual posts and pages to share their feedback or even offer suggestions. Not only are you the business owner able to read this valuable customer feedback, you can also choose to show the comments to the public allowing other clients to see real customer feedback. Sometimes blog comments can be more valuable than any customer testimonial.

Many prospective customers choose their products and services based on the businesses reputation. Positive reviews and feedback on your products and services can often be more effective than an expensive marketing campaign. The comments can also provide an unofficial FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section. Many surfers will often read a posts that relates to their questions and problems to see if the comments answer their questions before they will visit a sites FAQ. By making comment posts visible to all visitors you will probably answer the questions of many potential clients.

Also, responding to any comments left by customers, even if you are only saying “thank you”, will show your potential clients how well your company treats customers. This will make a potential client feel more confident about doing business with your company for the first time. It will also help establish a possible reputation for your online business.

Please remember to monitor all comments that are being left on your blog. Most blogging platforms will let the website owner moderate all comments prior to the public being able to view them. This will help avoid comment spam. Many companies sell software that will automatically send comments to blogs that cover certain subjects. Some of these comments could be offensive so manually monitoring comments will help avoid embarrassing situations.

Even if you do not have a business online or otherwise that needs to be promoted you can still benefit from a blog. Many of the most profitable and popular blogs on the Internet today started out as personal diaries or commentary blogs. By adding ads to your blog or doing other things to capitalize on traffic you can turn your casual past time into a profitable business venture.

Gregg Brown is owner of Easy Secure Domains. Where you will be able find Domain names, Web Hosting, have a Custom Web Site or Blog designed. Also the tools to build a Web Site your self.
EasySecureDomains.com

Blogging Sites- Free Helpful Hint For Bloggers

Finding specific information about blogging sites might not be easy, but we have gathered very helpful and relevant information about the general subject matter, with the ultimate aim of assisting you out. Even if your search is about another blogging sites information, such as blog audio, teen blog, create your blog or even blog yam com, this article will prove very helpful, without saying a lot.

To make your blog have those swinging hips you need to feed it with a list. What kind of list? A list of email prospects that is supplied with valuable information regularly via email. You can subtly send them directly to your affiliate links or boldly direct them to your blog with your affiliate links strategically placed to ensure maximum exposure and click through.

Make friends with your competitors, use your colleagues and encourage your employees or partners to write articles for your blog. Again, give them the benefit of the link. You’ll be surprised what comes out of sharing your blog space with those around you, and it’ll provide your readers with a better mix of writing styles. Encourage your readers and customers to propose article topics and submit questions. Great for writer’s block.

Long blog entries bore people. You should not be afraid to break up entries, you don’t have to post the whole story in one day. Also, make use of bullet points, numbered lists, and pictures.

If this article still doesn’t answer your specific blogging sites quest, then don’t forget that you can conduct more searches on any of the major search engines like Yahoo to get specific blogging sites information.

If you want to develop a blog network, your aims will be to: develop a mission for the network, as well as a clear idea of where and how you’ll add blogs to the network, and where and how the revenue stream will be built.

After you’ve decided the subject of your blog, you will then need to register with a web logging host. The most popular web logging hosts are BlogSpot and Word press, both of which offer their service for free. Just go to their websites, follow the instructions and get your blog up and running. You can then spruce up the look of your blog by choosing between pre-designed templates, colors, fonts and designs.

Making money web logging is the best way to dip your toe in the internet marketing waters. It is absolutely free to do, and if you become proficient at it, then there is no reason why you can’t be making many hundreds of dollars a month, if not four figures. Furthermore, if you’ve successfully done it once, you can successfully do it again with another blog. Rinse, repeat and watch your online income double.

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Blogging Guidance- Important Info For Bloggers

You see, we should be very thankful that we are born in this modern generation due to the existence of the Internet. With the Internet, all information (whether about blogging guides or any other such as e-commerce blogs, social security fraud, high school sports or even reseller hosting) can be found with ease on the Internet, with great articles like this.

Your commissions should be reinvested into PPC ads and e-zine advertising, especially solo ads. The urge to get your own domain name and hosting may start to grow and this is strongly urged. However, if you choose to remain on Blogger like me then no problem; it’s not what you have, but what you do with it that counts.

You should not forget to throw in calls to action for your reader to contact you. Hopefully, your posts are valuable and you, the author, are becoming regarded as a “go to guy (or girl) by your readers. Don’t forget to remind them that you are a resource and provide them with effective calls to action to reach you. If you’re unsure about how to make the most effective use of your blog and specific calls to action, or aren’t getting the traction you want on the search engines get in touch with me, I’ll be happy to assist you out. (See how I snuck that one in!)

Long blog entries bore people. You should not be afraid to break up entries, you don’t have to post the whole story in one day. Also, make use of bullet points, numbered lists, and pictures.

Many people forget that they can get more information about any subject matter, be it blogging guides information or any other on any of the major search engines like Google. If you need more information about blogging guides, head on to Google and be more informed.

If you’re selling a service, you know that it’s hard to differentiate yourself from the thousands of others who are selling the same service. A blog is a way to do that. If you’re a dance coach, for instance, you’ve got plenty to write about. You’ll attract lots of new business, and you can bring in extra income when you solicit your equipment suppliers to advertise on your blog.

The Internet is the essence of marketing, by that I mean, every word in an ad matters, every color, where the ad is located on your blog, whether it is blinking or not, and the color of the text. It might not seem like all of those things matter, but the fact is, everything that you decide matters. The good thing is you can experiment with how your blog looks as much as you want. There are several e-books written on how you should place and where you should place them, in the beginning, just go with the basic blog setup until you get the hang of things.

Google Adsense is Google’s own advertising program. After signing up for a free account, you will be given a snippet of code. If you go to your blog account and open up the Source page, you can paste in the code in the relevant spot and Google adverts will start running on the page. Every time a visitor click on a Google advert, you will get paid a sum of money, based on what advertiser’s value the click to be worth.

We discovered that many people who were also searching for information related to blogging guides also searched online for related information such as hosting service, blog policy, and even travel across blog sites.

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Use Your Blog To Increase Sales

For some of us blogging is just about passing time and writing something on a webpage that is of interest to us. Most of us use blogs as a tool for self expression, to make new friends or discuss any issue. But is this all that blogging is about? Well there’s much more that a blog can do for you. It can help to increase your sales and improve your relationship with your clients tremendously, which ultimately again leads to massive increase in sales and profits.

So how does it help in improving your brand value, sales, product quality and client-company relationship? Well we’ll share it with you here. Blogs are great marketing tools and when used effectively can attract a lot of potential customers.

Imagine you are running a small fashion house and you have developed some new designs that you are not sure whether people are going to like them or not. What do you do? You’ll go and show them to some of your closest friends but not many people for the fear of word spreading out that you have produced such and such designs. But there is another way.

You can put snaps of some of those designs on a blog and then invite people from different walks of life to check them out and give feedbacks on the designs. Such people can be easily found at the various fashion and clothing related online forums. You don’t even have to reveal your name or company’s name till you feel comfortable. This is one of the best ways to get the most genuine feedbacks about your products.

Blogs also offer a great way to improve your product quality. A certain Swiss lock-maker found that their sales were on a constant decline despite increasing demand and was desperate to know what was wrong with his latest designs. The lock-maker started one where he informed people about the high quality of metal used and the latest technology that he was using in manufacturing the locks.

People accepted everything but everyone on the blog left a feedback which shocked the lock-maker and brought to light real cause of plummeting sales, the key to the lock. The key being supplied with the new locks way too small for comfort and often got bent after a few months of regular use. The company immediately changed the key specs and all the faulty locks and ensured that its reputation was kept intact.

Blogs are a great way to also improve relationship with your clients and also to make sure that they remain loyal to your brand. They are also a great way to tell people what all they can do with your product. Several small software firms do that because often people don’t realize what all functionalities that they offer with their products. A lot of mobile phone companies blog to inform people about what all their mobile phones can do and what all features people are looking forward to.

Most of the products that are designed in today’s world are designed based on client requirement or based on what a group of people in the society need. So it is imperative to know what they want if you want your company to make handsome profits.

Blogs can also be used for advertising too and therefore you can earn money or promote some other business of yours or a relative’s or a friend’s through your own blog. Blogging has truly come a long way since its inception and has become more than just a bare necessity for individuals and business.

Jonathan Hook offers free tips on how to make money with your blog at www.e-bloggers.com. Click now and start earning money with your blog

Profitng And Benefiting From Wordpress Ella

The “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other Wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

Brandon Hong has helped thousands of business owners
to make more money, grow their subscribers, and expand
their business through the use of Wordpress blogs, rss and podcast. http://www.wordpressvideos.com

Are You A Forum Spammer?

One of the most successful kind of websites for social interaction among people with common interests is a forum. There are forums for every interest in the world and many are used by industry leaders in business as well as celebrities. From sports to gardening, marketing to politics, religion to popular music, every niche has a forum.

For website owners, forums are an opportunity to get more exposure and brand themselves as a expert in their field. Giving advice, sharing stories, networking, and asking questions are the most commonly found content in posts, except for one type…

The Spammer

Unfortunately, many high quality forums are ruined by the entrance of spammers. There are several types of forum spammers, some more subtle and others who are totally blatant. It is generally considered good forum etiquette in include any kind of self-promoting links in your forum signature, a little post that gets added to all of your text posts. These signatures are most often in BBCode and occasionally in HTML.

The blatant spammer will simply use these code in their posts to promote links to whatever site they want. Often this is the case with inexperienced affiliate marketers who don’t know how to appropriately promote their site so they post it in forums asking people to visit.

If this tactic ever works it can only be because of ignorance on the part of the forum members. What’s worse is that the post is simply the URL embedded with obvious affiliate identity tags and the post itself brings no contribution whatsoever to the community, it’s just an ad.

The next step is that these forum spammers figure out that nobody is clicking on their links so the decide that the obvious identity tags in the link are driving people away because nobody wants to be somebody else’s money making machine. The now novice affiliate goes and gets a “tinyurl” to hide the affiliate tags in their link and then they start posting that one everywhere, once again, blatantly advertising without contribution. After a little while they figure out that they still aren’t getting people to click on their link, and start finally recognizing that affiliate marketers use “tinyurls” like candy and most people know that is a tactic to make the website owner more money and even worse, people feel like the owner tried to actually trick them into clicking on the link.

At this point the affiliate discovers he or she can change the link text so it isn’t so obviously an affiliate link, so while the posts themselves continue as ads, the text to click on is no longer the URL but a phrase full of hype that says something like “my program makes me lots of money” (which it usually doesn’t) so now they are starting to feel a little more confident. The spammer, however, is starting to realize that the posts are getting lots of complaints and no friends are being made in the community.

The affiliate is starting to realize that people don’t want to be sold to on the forums. His intention of capitalizing on the niche is not a problem, but the method of attracting clients is like trying to see the sunset by running east. It’ll never happen unless the approach is changed.

The spammer then decides to make a choice. Spam the forum or join the forum for the same reasons the other members of the community do and simply include a subtle link in their signature and actually become a contributing member.

Don’t be a spammer, play by the rules. You’ll have more friends, generate more interested prospects, and escape being banned from the best forums in the world.

Tyler Ellison teaches how to make fast easy money online marketing legally using automated systems and guerilla techniques to promote businesses.

Why Everyone Should Have a Blog

Blogging is not a passing fad… it’s another channel for you to use as a marketing tool and a creative outlet to get more mileage out of your voice over business!

Learn more about the benefits of blogging and how you can get started to make your mark in the blogosphere. There’s no better time to get typing. Blogging as a voice actor should certainly be on your To-do List. There’s a very small learning curve and often the software is free to use.

What are some of the benefits to you as a blogger writing a blog?

- A greater web presence
- More relevancy
- A global means to communicate to customers and peers directly
- Higher search engine rankings
- Ability to receive positive feedback and constructive criticism

Those are some technical benefits of blogging, however, there are many other benefits that will broaden your horizons and network of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends.

Blogging also connects you with

- Your community
- New customers
- Fellow bloggers
- Organizations
- Friends

Dozens of voice talents and voice actors already have blogs that they use to promote their services, demos and use as tools to converse with other people about the voice industry.

A while ago, we published a blog post that recognized some voice talent bloggers. Since that post, there have been many other voice talents who have joined the blogosphere and added their voice (both figuratively and literally) to the happenings of our industry and beyond.

To set the record straight, every level of the industry should be blogging. Right now, the vast majority are voice talents blogging.

I foresee that coaches will be blogging, providing some value upfront via the blog about voice overs, vocal health, and present opportunities that lead to more students signing up for their classes. It would be interesting to see casting directors and agents blogging as well.

Trust me, you don’t have to look far to see that there are hundreds of questions out there about agents, how to get one, who should I go with, and the list goes on. If every agency had a rep blogging about what they look for in their agency, if they have openings for particular voice types, and so on, those lines of communication would do the industry good, giving a positive first impression to potential clients while establishing their platform as a voice talent agency.

Another aspect of the industry that is regrettably nowhere to be seen are the unions, perhaps the element of the industry that would benefit most from having a blog to educate members and potential members of their organizations.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone from AFTRA, SAG, ACTRA, Equity, or any other union was blogging in effort to dispel myths and answer frequently asked questions about their union via a blog? People would be more informed and would likely join such unions more decidedly if more information was presented before having to make a commitment.

If everyone in this industry was blogging, or at least representatives for every aspect of the industry, there would be less confusion, more lines of open communication, and further development and unification of the voice industry as a whole. If the entire industry was blogging, it would be seen as an industry, not as a fragmented piece of the larger entertainment fold. Technology has done much to improve the business of voice overs over the years and blogging is another way for us to use technology to our advantage.

Now, for some objection handling:

If I blog and give away my knowledge, what’s to stop others from passing it off as their own?

Stop right there! Sharing your knowledge is not giving others carte blanche to plagiarize your work. Etiquette in blogging is pretty strict. People who reference a work or source will note it in their post with a text link back to where they found the information.

If I give away too much information, people will never buy my product or service.

The opposite is true. By presenting useful information to your audience, you build trust and authority. Smart consumers know who the real deal is, so if you’re providing quality content and ideas, they’ll be coming to you to get the job done.

Only writers and journalists are allowed to publish material.

Have you ever heard of citizen reporters and citizen journalism? Every day, regular people take the time to report on what they see. Citizen reporters and bloggers were instrumental in getting the word out in times of natural disaster (re: Hurricane Katrina or Tsunamis) and give a voice to stories that often are not picked up by larger media bodies.

More and more, traditional journalists, writers, newscasters and even courts of law are relying on content created by educated people or and those with exclusive information that was not covered by local news.

I hope I’ve given you some inspiration and motivation to start blogging!

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the VP of Marketing with Voices.com, the voice over marketplace hosting more than 8,000 professional voice talents. Stephanie is also the author of The Definitive Guide To Voice-Over Success.

What is a Blog? From an Internet Marketers Perspective

I have been getting quite a few emails from my list members asking what exactly a blog is.

And I’m so dumb I thought everybody knew.

What I failed to realise is that some of my newsletter subscribers are logging online for the first time and don’t know a blog from a burger.

I will try to explain from an Internet Marketers point of view, what a blog is and what it’s uses are in the simplest way I can.

I started blogging a couple of years ago and today most of my sites are now blogs. The reason I love blogging is because a blog has so much more functionality than a normal run of the mill website.

The search engines also list a blog page much, much quicker than a normal webpage and tend to rank it’s pages higher. There are many reasons why this is so which are too complex to go into for the scope of this article.

In plain English, with a blog it is much easier to add content and web marketing tools to your site than it would be with a normal html site.

In it’s simplest form, a blog is a tool to add content to your website. The main control panel of a Wordpress is very easy to use and includes a WYIWYG editor.

I have laid out in steps 1-5 how you would post a new page to your website.

1.Write in Your Blog Post title - This will be the title of the new page or post on your site. It is good to use important keywords in the title. The title of each blog post will play an important factor in your search engine ranking.

2. Write out your post info - This is the content of your page. This can be text, images, videos, audio, anything that can be added to a regular webpage.

3. Format Your Text and Add Content - Highlight your writing with bold text, italics. Add links or images etc etc. This all can be done at the press of a button or two.

4. Choose the category where your post will appear - Pick a category which is relevant to your post. You can easily add more categories by clicking the ‘Add’ button, if one doesn’t suit your current post topic. There is another panel on the Wordpress blog for adding different categories.

5. Send Your Post to the WWW - Click the “Publish” button to publish to the web.

That’s it! That’s how easy it is to add content when you have a blog. Wordpress, from what I have experienced is the best option and it is free to download.

Now, moving on from just adding content, a Wordpress blog has 100s of plugins that you can add to improve all aspects of your websites functioning, from adding content automatically, improving search engine ranking, automatically posting to social bookmark sites. etc. etc. etc. The majority of plugins are free of charge just like Wordpress.

One of my plugins submits each post I make to 24 Social bookmark sites automatically and another automatically changes keyword phrases on my blog pages into my affiliate and website links.

You can add unique content to your blog or your can copy and paste articles from Ezine Articles straight to your blog.

Most blogs are usually theme based. I use blogs for the purposes of training my team and offering advice and recommendations to my list members. I could basically add content on any topic known to man and draw in visitors from the search engines. Most of the guys making $1000s from Google Adsense are doing exactly that - across 100s and sometimes 1000s of blogs.

In fact, setting up a blog in a niche you are interested in is very effective because niches have much less competiton than the Internet Marketing/Home business market.

In concluding, a blog is simple to use and a much more effective tool than setting up your content on a basic html website.

Visit Mal Keenan’s Plug in Profit Site for More Info on Blogging and Many More Internet Marketing Strategies: Plugin Profit Site
For More Info on Installing a Wordpress Blog on Your Own Website Check Out: Autoblog Income

Unique Blog Template’s Are Important!

Blogs have increased popularity over this past months. Many people have started to create their personal blogs to express their thoughts and feelings. Internet companies have also started their blogs to inform consumers on the latest product news and reviews.

Because of this, blogs are also being used as internet marketing media. Before, internet marketing is done by placing banners and links on popular websites, such as news and information sites. Links were also included on newsletters and marketing letters sent to the members of their mailing lists.

Many people spend time reading blogs. People read their friend’s blogs, their favorite author’s blogs, blogs on topics that they are interested in, and blogs on product reviews. With the increasing popularity of blogging, it is even feared that people rely on blogs to get the latest news.

While getting news reports from blogs isn’t reliable, some people look for product reviews through blogs. In some cases, this is more dependable. While it is true that some media persons are being paid to write good reviews about a certain product, blog writers write about their actual experiences on products and services from a company.

Since there are many people who read and start their own blogs, blogs are a good medium to market a product. With the increasing blog traffic means increase in product sales.

Blog traffic can be increased by joining affiliate programs and sites, which will list your blog under a certain search category or name. You can also have your blog advertised in popular websites. This, however, will cost some money and is not advisable if you have just started blogging.

A writer who has just launched his/her blog will want as much traffic as possible to increase advertisements on the site. Also, some advertisers pay every time their link is clicked or the page that has their link is viewed.

When you have increased traffic on your blog, you should try to keep you visitors coming back and recommending your blog to friends and colleagues.

This can be done by having informative or amusing content and good blog layout and design. You may develop your blog’s content or you can also acquire the services of a web content writer to provide you with the blog articles.

The blog’s layout and design also plays a big role. While most of the companies offering free blog hosting offer pre-selected templates, there are also some that allows customization that if you utilize this feature correctly can increase your blog’s traffic.

Here are a few tips to make your blog stand out from the millions of blogs out there that have standard designs.

Customize the banner - The banner usually has the most generic designs that are common to the blogs from a blogging company or service. You can personalize this banner by having a graphic with the dimensions of the banner. You can also edit the graphic so that it will also include the title of your blog. In this case, you can create your own graphic or you can purchase professional looking graphics online for less than $10.

Personalizing photos - Of course, most of the photos that you will be posting will be your own. However, if you don’t customize the photos before posting them, you may miss maximizing the enhancing benefits graphics can add to the page. Adding photo borders can help the photo stand out from the page.

It can also add to the design of your blog. You can choose a standard border or you can also create your own border which can be associated with your blog’s templates.

Add a favicon - Don’t you think sites with icons on the address bar before the website’s URL are cool? Many people do. These favicons add a professional look to the URL. These easy to do using photo or graphic editing softwares.

Check out blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins from sites. There are sites that offer free blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins. You can make use of these so your blog will not look generic like most of the blogs hosted by the service provider.

Include RSS feeds - This is a cool way to inform people with newsreaders about your blog headlines. Tutorials on RSS feeds are available on the internet.

Audio makes your blog more personal
Not only does audio personalizes the blog; it can also keep your visitors coming back. You can try having streaming radio stations, mp3 file or playlists loading with your blog.

Advertisements - If you have signed-up with Google Ad-Sense, which I am sure you would like to do, make sure that the ads are conveniently placed that these will not hinder your readers’ ease in accessing the information on your blog.

Try using these tips and you can definitely increase and retain traffic on your blog.

New free english bulldog and other breed pet classifieds website with a large pit bull forum.

The Bad Side of Blogging

There are millions of blogs online today and everyone is practically tripping over each other to start their own. My question is why?

You can answer that in word. Money! People think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make money for the first time in their life. The other thing is blogs are so simple to start that a child of 10 could do it.

Of course after a few days the new blogger begins to realize that the money is not flowing in and this is going to become work. They sure are spending a lot of time working on their new blog and they have not made one penny off of it yet.

This is the bad side of blogging. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your blog and it takes even more work to convert some of that into a paying customer.

If you value your time you lose money every time you set down and post in your blog. Let’s say you spend 30 minutes writing a 400-word blog post and you do that everyday for 1 month. You have just spent 15 hours and you may not have even made any money yet.

That’s the rub right there. First of all most people will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

Someone should start a blog orphanage for abandoned blogs that we could adopt and offer tender loving care to. The bad side of blogging is you may be the next victim of “blogging is work” syndrome. Another blog started and abandoned because blogging is work and is not the easy road to riches you hoped it was.

A really good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for the blogger. They have an interest in the subject matter. They may even be an expert in what they write about and their expertise shows.

The reader comes back over and over to see what the blogger will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product the blogger recommends. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is all so easy when the blog is kept up to date with useful information. The blogger has avoided the bad side of blogging.

Ricardy Banks is a regular article contributor on many topics. Be sure to visit his other websites Burnlounge entertainment revolution

Six Easy Steps to Making Money with Your Blog

I’m going to give you 6 quick pointers on how to optimize your blog to drive traffic and hopefully earn some extra Adsense and affiliate income.

One huge benefit of using blogging as a means to create your site vs. trying to build your own is the ability to monetize your content immediately and not have to worry about page layout, graphics, hosting, domain names, and content management. This is a massive time saver when using the free bloggers such as Blogger or Wordpress hosting. The downside is that you cannot fully control the fine tuning of your site for specific optimizations. Nevertheless, you must let go of this desire and focus on your content - which is a very good thing.

So, let’s start with the key topics you need to consider when optimizing a blog:

1. The Blogging Service
2. Layout
3. Links
4. Keywords
5. Traffic
6. Site Tricks

1. The Blogging Service - this is a very important choice because some of the free blogging services do not allow you to place context ad such as AdSense on the free blogging service (they allow it if you host your own blog). Because of this I strongly recommend using Blogger as your free service since it is easy to use and is ad friendly.

2. Layout - since you are using a free service you must get over the desire to control your site. Let go! Most free blogging sites allow you to tweak the layout somewhat. There are some tricks you can use to easily keep your site a blog but at the same time add sections as if you were on your own site. For example, keep one blog entry for all of your favorite external links and descriptions. This is where you can continue your link sharing with other sites and continually add new ones. Now, add a specific link to this article on the sidebar so that there is a direct reference when the article gets archived. That way any readers will always find the links article and not have to search or stumble upon it. (Note, you can use this same technique for additional pages that refer to specific topics so that you have a directory of topics on your sidebars).

3. Links - besides the links I noted in #2 you should always use plenty of linking from within every article you publish. The internet values links and the more you use from your blog entries the better. Other sites pay attention to who’s linking to them and when they see a referral in their logs your appreciation level increases. Also, add your favorite affiliate and topic links to your sidebars.

4. Keywords - I cannot stress the importance of this but I’m not going to go into detail on keyword identification other than to say that each blog entry should focus on a SEO keyword phrase or name - especially the title. Be sure to use your titles carefully and use the same keywords in your entry. This will mark the blog entry to the keyword topic (remember, each blog entry is a separate web page that can be indexed). Also, be sure to include the keyword near the end of the blog entry as well.

5. Traffic - don’t forget to promote your blog to drive traffic! Use all the means possible to do this - forums, articles, reprint rights, etc. Be sure to post well written comments on other highly ranked blog sites. However, don’t make the mistake and write only a quick comment. Always write your responses in a way that is interesting and direct to the point. There’s enough free material out there to do this!

6. Site Tricks - another simple technique is to place hard coded links to your favorite blog entries and articles in the bottom of the Blog template. That way it will show up on every page. Eventually you can make this your site map which is very important to the search engines. The last thing you want is your blog links to be archived!!

And, of course, don’t forget to add your AdSense sections.

Just by completing these 6 simple tasks you can get your blog monetized in no time at all!

Don James is an internet developer and online marketer. Discover a easy way to make your sites or blogs profitable with Honest Riches at Holly Mann - Smart Woman vs. Rich Jerk

Voice Actor Blogs on the Rise

Over the past year, there has been an incredible adoption of the creation and consumption of blogs worldwide. Blogs are generally used as online journals for individuals and tend to form a community around the person writing the blog posts and their audience. Corporate blogging is used to give customers a means to provide feedback and to help with product development while getting to know the company better.

According to blogging authority Technorati, as of September 2nd 2006, they are tracking 58.2 million blogs, a number that continues to enjoy exponential growth. As of September 1st, Feedburner, an online media distribution tool, manages over 389,325 unique feeds, serves 236,632 publishers, and over 21,933,188 subscribers to blogs, podcasts, video podcasts, and more.

The entertainment industry in particular has seen a sharp rise in the number of voice actors blogging about the industry, opening up about their careers, recording techniques, and sharing trade secrets with aspiring voice actors entering the field of professional voice acting. A great deal of social networking has occurred as a result, introducing isolated voice actors to each other, giving them a means to reach colleagues who live next door or even thousands of miles away.

The blogosphere is now recognizing that voice actors have unique voices, both behind the microphone and in their daily observations.

A recent post on VOX Daily asked its readers to comment with the name of their blog, the web address of their blog, and to detail what they write about. The blog post included a reference to the blog of voice actor Bob Souer, a voice talent blogger.

Bob had published a post about fellow voice actor David Houston, directing his audience to a fresh look at how to get into the business of voice acting. David Houston hosts his blog on his website. David uses his blog to help direct traffic to his main website.

Donna Papacosta introduced herself to other voice talent bloggers leaving a comment about her blog. Donna is a voice actor and communications consultant. She produces her own podcast in addition to blogging, a multi-pronged approach to reach her customers online and on their iPods. Donna’s blog and podcast focus on communications topics, including writing, speaking, marketing, and podcasting.

Wayne Henderson shared both his website and podcast with VOX Daily. Wayne’s podcast discusses the infamous TV show LOST, Ballroom Dancing, Kiefer Sutherland’s show “24″, the Green Bay Packers football team, and his journey as a voice talent. Wayne likes to keep on top of blogging and podcasting news and is excited to learn more about his colleagues.

Voice actor Karen Commins, writes about her life as a voice actor and focuses on helping fellow colleagues to develop a healthy and fulfilling voice acting career. Karen feels that through her blog she is helping people interested in voice-over on a much greater scale than she could achieve on an individual basis.

Journeying along the same road is Glad Faith Klassen’s blog “Heart Talks”. Glad, broadcaster and a voice actor, uses blogging to share her feelings on a personal level about her faith, people she meets and how they affect her life. G. Faith’s blog is hosted on her website. She loves getting comments from people who tell her something she wrote ‘resonated’ with them.

Voice actors who want to share their experiences and insight with other voice actors discover that starting a blog is the perfect way to connect with others while giving something back to their community. A blog performs multiple functions as mentioned earlier, including a creative outlet, a means to communicate, a nurturing environment, networking opportunities, and contributes significantly to search engine rankings.

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the editor of VOX Daily, and VP Marketing of Voices.com, hosting more than 7,000 professional voice talents. Stephanie is also the author of The Definitive Guide To Voice-Over Success and The Voice Over Script Collection.

Strategies for Preventing Comment Spam

Bloggers are painfully aware of website owners who try to improve their websites rank by adding links to blogs. There are several strategies for combating this problem. The first and most obvious method is to avoid free blogger sites. These are favorite targets for comment spam.

Bloggers who own their own software can add a no-follow tag. The rel=nofollow tag does not stop the spam, but it does stop robots from following the link. Blogger, owned by Google, implements these tags already. Wordpress has anti-comment spam plug-ins to help bloggers stop comment spam.

Do not bother banning the IP address - unplugging a computer for one hour can change the IP address, and changing a servers IP address is relatively easy. Some companies buy IP addresses in blocks of a hundred or more, and spammers also use open proxies. These are IP addresses that allow anyone access.

Configuring a blog to prevent javascript and HTML code in replies is a solid and easy to implement method of attacking comment spam. It is possible to configure some blog software programs to automatically convert any string that starts with http:// into a url. This will not stop manual comment spams, but it will stop the crawlers.

The spam crawlers search the web looking for descriptive form names. Field names like comment or reply make it too easy for comment spam crawlers to find a potential victim.

Many blogs are using CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). This new tool requires the user to post a text and number combination before their post is published. However, a simple trip to the freelance bidding forums already indicates that countries (Ukraine and India are the most obvious) are hiring people to do nothing but post comments all day. This undermines CAPTCHA tools anyway!

If you are able to configure your blogs software, then there is a very simple trick for stop automated comment spam software. The form submit HTML is:

form method=”post” action=”http://www.example.com/bin/comment”

The action specifies the web address (URL) of the executable used to publish the form results. Simply remove it and add an onsubmit attribute:

form method=”post”
onsubmit=”this.action=http://www.example.com/+bin/post-a-comment”

This is not 100% effective, but it will stop most spam crawlers.

There are two other methods that are available to most bloggers. The first is user authentication - this requires the person to sign up for a user name and password before publishing a post. This slows down comment spammers in two ways: (1) they must take an extra step before publishing, and (2) most authentication programs are configured to accept an email address once.

The second method is to moderate every post before it is published, but the sheer time involved can be daunting. However, the advantages of having 100% control over your blogs content can tip the scales in the favor of moderating. Many posts do not use relative keywords, or post irrelevant comments based on an emotional reaction to the information. Moderating the blog allows the blog owner total control over the information on their page.

The Commentator is a unique program that blocks comment spam, while it builds a double opt in mailing list. For more information visit
The Commentator

Search Engines Need a Steady Flow of Content

The Internet is full of Saturday Morning Bloggers. These bloggers ignore their blogs all week, then they post a few dozen articles in their blog and then spend a few hours adding comments to other blogs. This is a great way to spend a Saturday, but it provides very little SEO marketing benefits.

Search engines need a steady flow of comments. Most blogs that appear in a web search have a post that has been published within the last few hours. Dozens of blog search engines operate for the sole purpose of alerting the big five search engines of new content. The posts that you publish on Saturday are already out of the lists by Sunday afternoon. That is why it is important to provide the search engines with fresh content daily.

A steady stream of content is so important that some blog software programs have a delayed publishing plug-in. This lets the blogger upload multiple articles at one time, but it waits until a pre-determined time to publish each one. This is a great idea, but it is only half the solution.

The blog search engines must be pinged shortly after the blog is posted. There are several good pinging services on the web. Most of them ping a few dozen blog search engines, telling them that your blog has new content.

This confuses most bloggers. They believe that tagging an article with a blog search engine like Technorati or Del.icio.us is all they need to do. Tagging is a method of introducing a list of your articles to potential readers. Tagging has nothing to do with building in-bound links or a web pages rank. Tagging is for peoples benefits. Pinging is for the benefit of search engines.

Publishing one blog a day and then pinging the blog search engines will ensure that the big five search engines never forget your blog. www.weblogs.com gives a visual of how blog pinging works. Each of the blog posts that appear on the page have pinged the blog search engines.

An overly simplified method of explaining pinging is by comparing it to crawling a webpage. Instead of waiting for a robot to crawl the blog, ping the search engine while the news is still fresh.

Another excellent strategy is to invite your reader to leave a comment. Comments are picked up by search engines as new content. The only problem with allowing comments it the potential from comment spam.

The Commentator is a unique program that blocks comment spam, while it builds a double opt in mailing list. For more information visit
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The Viability of Blogging to a Niche Market

Niche marketing is an old and very successful marketing strategy whereby a company focuses on marketing and selling to a clearly defined segment of potential consumers. The company earns by supplying a unique product or service to this narrowly defined market which other companies have not met or provided.

Are there potential buyers online? According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s latest figures, there are over 185.55 million internet users in the United States alone, of these around 139.52 million active users. The Computer Industry Almanac which compiles statistics on global internet users, records a staggering 934 million users for 2004 and this market continues to grow.

Do these users buy online? Statistics gathered on internet users, show they do and their numbers are increasing. For instance, in December 2004, online sales rose by 53%, from $795 million of the same month 2003, to $1.22 billion 2004, (gathered by CMP Media a service provider of information and marketing services to the technology and healthcare industries). For each unique marketing hook, product and service, your business blog can tap in, that’s how many niche markets you can serve.

The next question then to answer: Can your blog be the perfect vehicle for reaching and marketing to your niche?

You should realize that successful blogs go a step further in providing excellent content, as well as regular updates or new content. Most websites provide these services. Rather it is the ability of these blogs to provide the author and the readers’ a venue for one-on-one conversations, in an impersonal medium. By sharing commentaries, thoughts and opinions, the author positions himself or herself as being an authority in his or her field of work. If you write content that is relevant to their needs, they’ll remember and keep returning to your blog.

But that’s not all; you need to have an abiding passion for the subject matter or product you’ll sell. Without this, your blog won’t stand out and carve itself a niche apart from the other blogs.

In essence, a well researched and crafted business blog is a potential revenue center. It has the authors’ personal touch and speaks to the need of this particular consumer. As every marketing analyst knows, when a seller understands his or her consumers well, this seller gets their business.

If your blog is not following the above criteria then maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Start a Home Based Business Newsletter
For More Info on Making A Full-Time Income with Blogs Check Out: Rob Benwells Baby Blogging Bonanza

Starting A Blog - With Traffic Using Search Engines, Tag & Ping and Other Tips

Starting blog: You can start a blog with your own domain installed www.Wordpress.org as blogging script at your own host. This is what savvy marketers do for their blogs. Other option includes starting blog with Google at www.Blogger.com both Wordpress and Blogger are free, easy to start with and both have comprehensive tutorials for beginners.

Blog Design: means the Design, format and structure of your blog. What will be the colors in background, what will be the font color, and font face and how many columns the blog page will have, Will the sidebar at right side or at left side. Just jot down the things you want to have in your blog and choose most suitable Template for your blog. There are so many free templates available to choose from for both Blogger and Wordpress. Otherwise you can hire someone to design a template for you specifically according to your choice and needs.

URL Structure: This should be user friendly as well as search engine friendly. To make any URL user friendly it should be something short and concise but make sense that what will be the page about having this URL. Like /blog-tips.html is best than /article23.php Having URL structure like /post-title.html instead of /post?123 makes search engines and users experience beneficial for them and for your blog.

Blogging: Blogging is logging something everything related to the topic, daily, regularly. This is just as people in the past use to write their diary daily. So a great blog about Traffic Tips is that blog which is updated regularly. So if you want results from your blog. DO blogging i.e. posting very often at the specified topic of your blog.

Categorizing: Categorizing your content increase the search engine ranking and user experience at your blog. So if my blog is about Traffic Tactics, you can have categories Free Traffic, Increase Traffic, Buy Traffic and Targeted Traffic. This help the blog rank high in related topics.

Tagging: tagging is hot topic now a days, if you want your content/post get great visibility and wide exposure, Tag your content. This can be done with pre-installed plug-in in your blogging script or manually adding for specific Tagging sites. Popular sites include technorati.com Del-icio-us and digg.com

Pinging: whenever you post something new at your blog, pick a loud speaker and announce to the whole world that your blog has something new! To do this online Ping your blog with any pinging service site. So after you post something new go to www.pingomatic.com or www.pingoat.com and PING your blog. This is easy and take less time but big benefits.

Linking : Link swapping or link exchanging is a right and legitimate way to increase your search engine ranking. You can ask related bloggers manually for link exchange or you can use specific services to help you find link swapping partners. Two famous sites specially for bloggers are www.link2blogs.com and www.bloglinker.com . To get maximum benefit from link swapping, only exchange links with related bloggers and do not link to the sites or blogs which are using Blackhat SEO tricks.

Directories: Submit your blog to blog directories and niche directories. This will help your blog in two ways, firstly you will get direct traffic from there, and secondly your blog will have one another permanent link there. Which will boost your search engine ranking and you can expect more free traffic from search engines.

Search Engines: In the above lines I have discussed many tips to boost your search engine ranking. But what if your blog is new and have not yet spidered or indexed by any big search engine like msn yahoo or google. So you want to add your website in Google’s database fast? Here is a million dollar tip but free for you, to get indexed new blog in google within a day or two. To do this, go to www.craigslist.com and post a free ad with the link of your blog. This site is PR8 and your will get indexed ASAP. But use the site legitimately and with good faith according to their rules. Do not abuse or spam this site otherwise you will be wasting your time with no success.

Now your site is in Search engines databases, now it’s your duty to do blogging regularly, posting new content, tagging, pinging, and sticking to the main topic. If you keep doing this, you will be getting your blog organically growing and getting traffic in truckloads, happy blogging and happy free traffic!

Mohsin Rasool is a FREE TRAFFIC EXPERT, who does blogging about Free Instant Traffic daily at http://acmeaims.com/website-traffic. Visit his blog, there is so much to read and apply to get INSTANT FREE TRAFFIC to your website and blog.

A Basic Introduction To Blogging

Web logging first appeared on the net in the mid-1990s. The term ‘web log’ was initially coined refer to a server’s log file and then expanded to include the meaning of online personal journaling. Later on, to avoid confusion, the word ‘blog’ was adopted to refer to personal journaling. Today a blog is defined as an online publication where an author puts his or her personal thoughts and opinions from the most intimate to corporate ideas, concerns or events, in chronological order on the net.

Although, there are as many kinds of blogs on line as there are people, most of these will roughly fall into these kind of bloggers: Personal Bloggers (the original use of blogging), then there are the organizational and business Bloggers.

Organizational blogs are meant to facilitate communications between its internal and external audiences. It may also provide information for the external publics’ use.

Business blogs promote products or services for profit. They also increase awareness about the company, as well as establish itself as an authority with customers, vendors, through publications that demonstrate their expertise in the market.

What are the kinds of contents that readers can find in a blog that’s for distribution? The authors’ ideas, opinions, expertise in his/her field of work, resumes, and home recipes, pictures, streaming audio or video clips, e-books, poetry, works, products, services and consultations.

Why have blogs become very popular compared to websites or email? Most websites are infrequently updated, while blogs have instant publishing tools which permit the author to regularly update & introduce new content. Although both have great content, websites are usually impersonal in informing their audience. While blogs allow the readers to leave their comments and feedback, to hold two-conversations with the author, who usually does the publishing and can immediately respond to his/her readers.

The blogs’ abilities to reach and immediately react to an expanding mass of audience have made businesses and marketers use these as a strategic marketing tool. Additionally blogs are very efficient, cheap to use and can quickly distribute information.

However, before you decide to jump on the blogging bandwagon, take time to find out what are your objectives for creating your own blog. Is it a personal, organizational or business blog? This will help you decide on what your blog will contain, where you’d place it and what publishing tools you’ll be using.

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For More Info on Making A Full-Time Income with Blogs Check Out: Rob Benwells Baby Blogging Bonanza

Promoting Your Business Using Blogs

Internet marketing using blogs has quickly gained a lot of popularity as a wonderful way to promote your business.

There are many ways that blogging can help in the promotion of your business. Since blogs are usually full of links and contain a large amount of keywords it will give your site a much better chance of being picked up by a search engine allowing more exposure for your business.

Taking a course on search engine optimization with help you determine the best keywords for your blog.

You can establish yourself to be very knowledgeable about the items your business carries and be influential in the decision making process of your customers. This will give you credibility in your field and generate leads for your business.

You can use your blog as a method of introducing the people behind your business to your customers giving your business a more personalized feel which will give you an edge on larger corporations. Also make sure that whomever you have creating the entries in your blog has suitable writing skills because by keeping the entries short and easy to read you will find it will bring your customers visiting often to see what is going on with your company.

Blogs can be used to run daily or weekly contests which is another great way to keep you customers coming back to your site. You can also highlight new business promotions with your blog. Blogs can be used to test out new projects or to get feedback on new products. If your blog contains a feedback feature you can judge the feedback a new product might receive before it goes live on your web site. Customers and potential customers will love to be able to give you input on the products or services of your business.

Photos are an excellent internet marketing tool to use on blogs. Having a picture and a short blurb describing the product can be a lot more effective then simply writing a descriptive paragraph highlighting the item. You can set up a frequently asked questions section to your blog and by leaving out a lot of the terms that public relations people use in their writing for large corporations you will be making your business a lot more personable which is what a lot of people prefer these days. You could add new questions you your site as you receive them if you believe they would be of help to your customers.

I personally have been making regular contributions to my blog over the last number of months. I am one of those slow learners who FINALLY caught on that these things do actually help increase traffic to my main sites and affiliate programs. I have been seeing excellent results and I’ve only just started.

The possibilities of internet marketing with a blog are endless and with the current popularity of blogging you would be making an excellent choice of creating one to aide you in the promotion of your business.

Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home Business Tips Newsletter.

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How to Create Your Own Free Blog

So what is a blog? You can think of it as a journal. Although many use them to post informational articles on whatever their topic is, you can use a free blog to post your daily activities or anything you want. Many allow you to post what is called a blogroll. This is a list of links to your favorite blogs or websites. There are many more great features you get and the best part is they are free.

When you create a website there are several things you must consider. You must register a domain and pay an annual fee. You must also pay for a host, which can be very costly for a good one. When it comes down to it starting a free blog just makes sense. Why pay all of that money for a website that you must create yourself.

So how do you create a free blog? That is an easy one; find a company like word press or blogger and register. It is that easy, they will walk you through the steps that you need to do in order to get it going. You do not need any prior knowledge of websites, hosting or anything else. Once it is set up all you have to do is post your thoughts in the pre-made template and then click the post button.

If you already own a normal website or you are considering it your site can benefit from your free blog as well. If the two are on the same topic you can use what is called RSS feeds to feed your posts onto your normal website. The benefit to this is that your site will have fresh original content every time you make a post.

Whatever your reason is to get one started it is important for you to know that you do not need any prior knowledge to do so and it is absolutely free. To find a good place to get started just do a search on any major SE and you should have no problem at all finding one. You may be better off going with one of the better known hosts but you may be able to find a good one that is just coming up.

If you get stuck along the way there are many websites available that will give you all of the advice you could ever need.

Joshua Spaulding provides Free Training on how to Make Money Online including how to Create a Free Blog. Joshua also runs a Quality Article Directory.

The Importance of Comments on Blogs

As a reader, you probably like reading the comments that are left on blogs and perhaps you even leave comments on posts that you enjoy. While you may just like comments, writing to you from the perspective of a blogger, I can tell you that we love them!

Every time I receive an email from our blog notifying me that a new comment has just been left, I get so excited.

Finding out what you think, learning from your perspective, and hearing how much you appreciate what we do is a real boost of energy and your comments inspire bloggers to continue providing their readers with news, fascinating content, and unique opportunities to be part of a thriving and united community.

Commenting on blogs is also about building community.

When you see several comments on a post, you know that people are being affected and are reaching out to others. When you see dozens of comments, well, that’s just incredible!

Commenting is a way for people to contribute to their blog community. For some people, commenting is a cathartic experience, for others, commenting is a way to share insight and to inspire others. Many people comment to say how much they valued a particular post or blog.

Each comment is a steppingstone to something more. It could be a conversation, a nugget of wisdom, or ideas for how to improve.

Many of your comments have resulted in improvements or additions to the blogs that you read, benefiting the entire readership and of course, making your experience consuming blogs more enjoyable and relevant to you.

I’ve heard that on average for every comment that is left on a blog post, at least 1,000 people have read that respective article. That statistic is encouraging and reminds bloggers that their audience is made up of all kinds of different people who contribute to the success of a blog.

Participating on a blog or being a part of a blog community includes activities such as reading, commenting, sharing, or even posting your own blog post inspired by what you have just read. This kind of activity is referred to as social media, a medium that has skyrocketed in popularity much in part to the Web 2.0 movement.

Blogs can be about any number of purposes including a personal journal, a corporate communications channel, online media outlets, product reviewing services, or reflections on the state of the world. To be more even more specific, there are all sorts of blogs, bloggers, and readers out there. There is truly a blog for every person.

To give you an example, my blog is a commentary, news outlet and editorial content provider for the voice industry, specifically people who record voiceovers and those who consume them. Our audience is comprised of professional and aspiring voice talent, voice actors, casting directors, voice over coaches, talent agents, studio producers, musicians, singers, station managers, creative directors, movie producers, and entrepreneurs.

We make a conscious effort to write about news, current affairs, human interest, and educational articles that inspire and motivate our audience and give our readership several different ways to get involved whether as a reader, commenter, contributor, or equipping them to be an evangelist for the industry.

Remember the official theme of the Olympic Games held in Torino, Italy this year?

It was “Passion Lives Here”.

That’s how we feel about the voice industry and we can best express that sentiment through our network of blogs.

The VOX Daily blog is just one way that we can connect with our audience but it is also a very important way that is accessible to everyone.

As the blog is online, it can be visited from anywhere, commented on, and consumed regardless of time of day, location, and even in some cases, language. Anyone can comment. I’ve seen comments from professional voice actors, teachers, fans of voiceovers and voice acting, investors, corporate entities, colleagues and family members of those featured on VOX Daily.

All of these comments have worth and inspire literally thousands of people around the world.

The more a blogger hears from you, the better and stronger their community becomes both online and off-line.

On behalf of all the bloggers out there, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts with us over the years and with your fellow readers.

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the VP of Marketing with Voices.com, the voice over marketplace hosting more than 8,000 professional voice actors. Stephanie is the editor of the Voices.com Blog Network.

A Threat to Your Wordpress Blog: Duplicate Content

Blogging is extremely popular these days. And the most popular stand-alone blog engine is Wordpress. It is flexible, has many useful featires and there is a lot of eye-catching templates for it. But those who have a Wordpress blog must be aware of a serious problem that can cause your blog to be removed from Google’s search results. The problem is: Duplicate Content.

WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic — a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the “next/previous entries” pages — those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not “human-friendly”.

Trackback URLs. Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like “yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/” its trackback URL will be “yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/”.

Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn”t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar.

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

Oleg Ishenko, MCSE, MCDBA, BSc

Get more useful info on SEO at our SEO Training Materials

Ten Ways To Make Your Blogging More Successful

Blogging is becoming the hottest trend today. Businesses have also incorporated them to use to get the attention of more customers and prospects.

For the internet marketer, blogs are an easy communication tool to enhance your online credibility and trust among customers. Besides that, blogs make it much easier for people to locate you online and communicate with you.

Most of the time, blogs are setup and then abandoned because of the time involved in constantly keeping them updated with new fresh content. And time is one thing that professionals do not have so much of. The result may not seem apparent in the beginning but it will be later on.

There are a couple of things you can do to make your blog work best for you, instead of you working for your blog. Once you learn these techniques, it should only take you 20 minutes a day to post successfully.

But I will also advise you that additional time should be spent on reading and commenting on your blog and other blogs on the internet. Doing this you will get to keep current customers and find potential new prospects.

Here are my ten ways to make your blogging more successful:

1. Always write important and original content. You might also want to narrate and share stories to point out your knowledge and wisdom. Never forget how telling your readers how you deal with clients. Let your readers know the value of what you are offering. Always make it easy for them to contact you should they have further questions about your services.

2. Post something new two or three times a week. Posts do not have to be very long articles. Short articles are ok as long as there is value to the reader.

3. Provide links to other useful resources on your blog. This is very important if you want to build traffic expanding your target market. You can research online for topics to post that is related to your niche. Write out comments on other blogs and let them know that you are spending time reading about them so they know that you are always available.

4. You need to submit all your blogs to blog directories and do trackbacks. If you don’t know how, get the help of someone that is an expert in this field. There are also blog tutorials available to read on other sites. You can also download many e-books on blogging and learn new tricks.

5. Keep track of who is visiting your blog. Set up a stat counter so you can see who has been reading your posts. This will also help you find out if you are getting repeat visitors to your blog.

6. Make a list of all the products and services you offer. Check to make sure all your links are working correctly. Visitors can easily get turned off quickly clicking on a link to some site not related to your blog. If your blog has a shopping cart, you can use your affiliate links and ad tracking features for easy access.

7. Link your blog to your own website and vice-versa. It is better to have a di