Seven To Ten

As a blogger, we need to conduct research frequently for our articles. Among my favorite research tools are google and of course, Wikipedia (the net’s encyclopedia).

Lately, I notice a lot of sites wanting to emulate the success of Wikipedia. The technical competency needed to create such a professional site is daunting but thankfully, Wetpaint allows you to circumvent your lack of knowledge. What you need is only your passion and some hard work in promotion.

Just in case you have never heard of a wiki, it is any website where users can edit/contribute text, polls, photos, and videos. Content can build up very fast if your site is popular. You can also control members’ access and privileges using the permission settings. Every modification on a wiki page is tracked (for accountability) and objectionable material removed easily, otherwise the quality will deteriorate and become a hotbed for spam.

The beauty of wikis is they are always work-in-progress. The more coats you add, the richer the story. To start your little wiki adventure at Wetpaint, just decide upon your topic of interest and then pick the appropriate site style. Then determine if you want to operate your wiki within a closed group or open it to the public, and choose your contributors wisely - is it a free for all to increase quantity or only to selected parties who can make insightful editions?

To summarize, Wetpaint combines the best of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks. That is why they are so attractive and have already powered more than 850,000 sites and counting. I have signed up already and once my wiki is up and running, I will announce it on this blog. Check out the site today and see if you can catapult your wiki into the next big thing.

I do not like clutter and the first impression I get from a site must be its cleanliness and user-friendliness. Loud, colorful banners and oft-centered pages really get on my nerves.

My sidebar is still pretty empty and it will be staying like that for a while. It may make the blog look empty and uninteresting but I always believe less is more. Unless your blog is really popular, you can get away with a lot of things, like John Chow.

The advertisements there have taken up all his available prime space but I doubt he is maxxed out yet. He will certainly be coming up with ever more creative ways to increase advertising revenue from his blog. Take a leaf from him if you want to know how to monetize your site. Earning over $30,000 per month is simply amazing.

Yes, the ads make for slow loading but his content is fresh and useful, so I don’t mind visiting his blog every few days. For smaller blogs, the amount of ads

We cannot do without friends if we want to succeed on the net, whether as a blogger or an affiliate marketer. Investing your time in any social community will pay off in the long run. Social networks are the rave right now, not without good reason.

I believe they can replace forums in the long run as members prefer to hang out there to discuss their favorite topics. There are so many activities going on at the same time, making new friends, renewing old friendship, uploading photos albums, joining or creating groups, blog posting, live chatting and listening to latest mp3 hits.

I already know of Stumble, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, etc. The new kid on the block is 3GB Community. I found about them through the buzz built by other bloggers.

In order to penetrate an already saturated market, new upstarts have to differentiate themselves. 3GB has several unique features, one of which is a radio station. It allows members to listen to albums of their favorite stars.

Another interesting aspect is their focus on the Arabic community around the world. Since the primary language is English, members from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc will love the 3GB as they understand English well.

I love the live chat feature and also the way you can separate friends into family, co-worker, etc. This is especially useful when you have hundreds or thousands of friends - you will appreciate the effort to organize them into various friend categories.

If you have time to spare, then join 3gb community 3gb.biz today and be among the early pioneers.

There is a fine line between email marketing and spam. You have to be careful when you are using this strategy to promote your products or services, else you get on the wrong side of the law. The main thing is to tie up with a reputable email marketing agency.

I have browsed through this website, iContact, and it looks impressive with a cliente boasting Fortune 500 companies (like Bank of America, Ford, Nissan, Super 8 Motel) and 183,865 users.

iContact has a user-friendly interface, over 300 professionally designed email templates, and also include, at no additional cost, surveying, autoresponder, and blogging tools to allow businesses to interact with prospects, customers, and subscribers.

Sending out email newsletters is effective since they provide a near perfect inbox deliverability. You can also add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers. The application allows you to track email performances (opens and clickthroughs) in real time with their charts.

Basic monthly prices start at $9.95, increasing proportionally with your list size. For corporations, they offer an Enterprise product that starts at $660/month.

As a blogger, I think this service is useful in pushing my product to a wide audience. Since emarketing is such a sensitive issue, I prefer to leave it to the pros, put it on autopilot and get great deliverability.

The monthly fee may put some people off especially when there is no revenue in the early days but you can try it out for a few months, once the traffic starts coming in, you can decide to continue with the service or not. By the way, there is a 15 day free trial of iContact. Check out the site today!

What is a blog carnival? Think of an event where a lot of people gather for the fun and entertainment. A blog carnival is not too far away from that.

As a blogger, you need links and in a blog carnival, you will find an array links pointing to blog posts about a niche topic. Usually, there are many editions of a blog carnival, and every week, different blogs will host it. It is easy to participate, as an example, go to the Blog Carnival website, browse around for relevant topics and submit your entries.

This is a simple yet effective method to promote your blog when you are starting out. The carnivals will give you exposure in the form of high quality relevant traffic and back links. Additionally it will also give you the possibility to interact with fellow bloggers.

I have wondered why some posts get digged more than others. It seems that there are groups of digg users who help some articles to score and get onto the front page.

I first knew about their presence from forums and you can join these groups and send articles to them for some digging. Bloggers can benefit from the exposure in terms of adsense earnings, traffic, subscribers, alexa ranking, back links, etc.

Certainly, this is manipulation of articles (and even cheating) to gain popularity, but I found that the standard of diggs have not decreased substantially as a result. There is a bury button if you do not like the article for either its junk or excessively-promotional content. Overall, I still enjoy the home page reads. What is your experience of digg?

Kodak has appointed a chief blogger. Great news that blogging is now recognized as an official position in an organization, not just any part time or surreptitious activity. And the pay must be lucrative too.

But for blogging enthusiasts, this does not mean all the big corporations will be offering such a vacancy and and we can all go apply. Jennifer Cisney, their first “Chief Blogger” has been an employee with Kodak for well over a decade before she was recently promoted.

This is still a great start, so just hone your skills, you never know when your boss need such a talent and if you have in your resume a few reputable blogs, the job is as good as yours.

There are more reasons out there why affiliate marketers fail. We will explore it later, here are two more…

Promoting Only One Product

Some affiliates promote only one product and the readers/customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales, it is always better to give them a few alternatives than to give them only one.

Promoting Too Many Products

The converse is equally true. Promoting too many products can harm your affiliate business. Customers become confused and end up not making a choice at all. They depend on your recommendations and if you say everything is good, they may not trust your judgment.

The more I write on this blog, the more I love it. It is a joy keeping track of my events and knowing that people can see what is going on in my life too, even if they are far away.

We can communicate through comments. I love reading other people’s blogs that I care about and seeing the things that they are interested in and hearing their stories. I love how sites can be personalized, and people can write about whatever they want without getting interupted with someone else’s opinion.

If you don’t like writing, what are the reasons? You can use blogger or wordpress and taking the first steps is easy. I can do it, so can you, just do it…

The optimal keyword density for SEO optimization is believed to be 2 - 10%. Overdoing it and the search engines will regard an article as spam. Article spam will cause your site to become sandboxed and getting out is not easy.

Below is a basic checklist for SEO optimization. Meaning places where the keywords used in writing our blog article should appear. They will not guarantee a top ten position in Google but it will help.

Title
Sub-header
Meta Tags ==> Keywords and Description

Some other tactics adopted by other SEO experts include using bold, highlighting, underlining and colored fonts in the text to improve readability. Inserting pictures to liven up the post is also a common characteristic for the popular blogs.

Sentences should be short and sharp. Most importantly, the content should be useful to the readers. After all, it is people who are reading and not search engines. Good content will have readers who link back on their own and with increased backlinks, you are sure to have more readers.