Students Of Success

“A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled
web log) is a web application presented as a webpage consisting
of periodic posts, normally in reverse chronological order”-
en.wikipedia.org. As you add content to your blog, new posts are
automatically positioned on top of previous posts, so your
visitors can see “what’s new.” Then they can comment on it or
link to it or e-mail you if they choose to do so. A weblog is
edited, organized and published often through a content
management system or CMS. The blogs are online diaries or
journals where blogger expresses his feelings, creativity,
research work with like minded surfers through her periodic
articles. Or weblog can be resembled to an online diary where
blogger submits his frequently visited links for reference of
the visitors.

The history of weblog can be traced back to the first website,
http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
In the ’90s there were a handful of websites and the life was so
easy. But with with the cluttering of thousands of new websites
each day, things turned to be complicated and it became harder
to find relevant information easily. Some novel eWiz like
Brigitte Eaton, Jorn Barger, Peter Merholz, James
Garrett,Cameron Barrett produced an alternative way to thread a
particular topic related websites in a page or link for more
convenience of the surfers to find content oriented sites in a
single bucket ! The idea grew popularity, and a number of
webmasters each day sent their URLs for listing in their
websites. The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger in
December 1997. The shorter version, “blog,” was coined by Peter
Merholz in 1999. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary
included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their
dictionary. Until ‘98 there were only a handful of weblogs in
the net, but according to a report, more than 14 million blogs
being published by the first quarter of 2005 !!

The popularity of Weblog is gaining momentum. As per a survey
conducted by Comscore.com, 50 Million US population ( i.e- 1 in
6 of total US population or 30% of the total US online
population) visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005.
This represents a 45% increase compared to the quarter one of
2004. Blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average
Internet user to have incomes of $75,000 or more. According to
the study, an average blog visitor spends 23 hours per weak
online, while average Internet users spent 13 hours online.”The
study also found that the blog visitors are 30% more likely to
buy products or services online. While less that 40% of the
total Internet population made an online purchase at Q1 of 2005,
51% of the blog visitors did”- Comscore.com. This is just a
replica of the universal acceptability of weblog these days. If
you are an online marketer or thinking to start an online
venture, I believe weblog is the best tool of Internet
marketing. Do you don’t think so??

Like Ezine ads, an Affiliate can use weblog as a futuristic tool
of online marketing. With a decent and cool content writting,
even a starter categorically can create a big blogsphere and use
it as a perpetual passive mean of generating targeted traffic.
The advantages of weblog over concurrent websites as a tool of
online marketing are astoundingly multifarious.

First, weblogs are SE friendly i.e. you never have to submit
your blog to any search engine. After you publish, your blog it
will be submitted to the common search engines by the blog
service provider. You never have to bother about on page
criterions. Your META TAGS and KEY WORDs will be set
automatically, eliminating the risk of keyword manipulation.

Second, zero designing and operation cost. You never have to
hire a web designer for designing your weblog, just choose the
right template and publish.

Third, Ping and Podcasting facilities promoting weblog as a
viral marketing tool. With single click you are informing the
whole world about your latest article updates.

Fourth, the next advantage of weblog over a web site is the
trackback facility, an automatic notification between websites
of related content–such as a post on a particular topic or one
which responds to a post on another blog . Use Trackback links
when you quote or refer to other blog posts.

Fifth, blogs are more likely RSS ( Really Simple Syndication)
integrated. All blog service providers, including Blogger.com
provide RSS feed link. When you update your new posting in
weblog and you use RSS feed, the SE crawlers will visit your
site and publish your content to across world wide web, all
silently.

Sixth, another great feature of blog is use of comment

Seventh, blog is a more personalized form of ezine. In ezines
and websites we express either our knowledge or services, but in
blog we can express our live experiences as if we are talking to
our best friend. Personalisation of postings increases the
Conversion Ratio of traffic to customer.

“Let’s be honest here… We’re all good at justifying excuses to
ourselves. I’ve even done it a few times myself ! But there
really is no excuse for not following your dream. You’re only
hurting yourself.” - Corey Rudl. If you are an ambitious online
marketer or if you are new to weblog, I can name a few of the
best blogging service providers like Blogger.com,
Livejournal.com, 360.Yahoo.com, Typepad.com, Blogs.com,
Xanga.com, DiaryLand.com where you should publish your first
blog to realize your dreams. Choose the write one and publish
your own blog today. For more cross reference, content, RSS
Feeding and listing of your blog you can use some of the Blog
Directories like- Masternewedia.org, Blogger.com,
Blogrankings.com, Blogcatalog.com, Blogsearchengine.com,
Blogwise.com, Weblogs.com, Blogrolling.com, FeedBurner.com,
EmarketingBlogs.com. Blog advertising related services are
provided by-BlogExplosion.com; Prosperall.com, Blogclicker.com.
Pluck.com provides free download toolbar which helps to
customize your weblog searching. I highly recommend you to give
a glance at their site. If you are dummy, please visit
Samizdata.net for blog related glossary and content.

I mentioned in my previous articles that RSS technology can be successfully used as an improved substitute for emails.

People simply subscribe to RSS feeds and they can use multiple RSS Readers to read those feeds. All major search engines - Google, Yahoo! and MSN now offer personalized “home pages” for their readers and the ability to subscribe to numerous feeds from those pages, and to read them right there. So they all now have built-in RSS Readers, so to speak.

What I didn’t quite realize before is that blogs can now also perform many functions of forums. In fact, forums in the future might give up most of their power of interactive two-way communications to blogs.

Why? Let’s look at forums closely. What are the main purposes of forums? To provide the place for people with certain common interests to hang out and to interact with each other and to interactively communicate with the host of the forum.

When the publisher of the newsletter sends e-mails to the list of his subscribers, it’s a one-way communication. If he really cares about his subscribers, he wants to provide them with the way to communicate back to him, to ask questions, to give their opinion, tell about likes and dislikes, request additional information on the particular subject, etc.

Emails are not really a choice anymore, many publishers receive so much spam that they simply delete e-mails from un-known sources.

So forum is a great way to create a community, to let people help each other and let them talk to other people and to the host of the forum.

Also, it’s a great way to create new content on auto-pilot. Hopefully you will have a few knowledgeable members in your forum and they will post thoughtful answers to other people questions. And those answers will lead to new questions, and on, and on, and on.

You just got yourself a constantly growing source of useful unique content, and search engines love fresh unique content.

However there are a few noticeable drawbacks in the forum structure. First, when you let people to freely communicate with each other, they unfortunately have a tendency not only to help other people, but bash them as well. Some are helping, others are bashing. You want your forum to stay a friendly place where people are willing to help each other, so you need to take some administrative steps - hire moderators, ban “bad apples”, etc.

Also, it’s not so easy to give forum a life. You need to get at least a few hundred people to subscribe to your forum in a short period of time, or it will slowly die. And you need to keep people active.

Even if your forum is thriving (which is of course a good thing), you have another issue. it’s hard to maintain control over the topics in the forum. You created it with a purpose of discussing certain topics, but in a while forum will start living the life of it’s own and you never know what other topic will pop-up. It may be a good thing, it may be a bad thing. But it certainly doesn’t help to keep this place in a line with your initial concept.

Ok, so let’s summarize the drawbacks of the forums: possible bashing posts and additional administration costs, forums are hard to launch, hard to keep the posts in a line with your initial concept.

Now let’s look at blogs. They have a fantastic feature called “comments”. That means any person who visited your site may leave a comment about your post (if you enabled comments in your blog settings, of course). They may tell you what they like, what they don’t like, ask you questions, etc.

Those comments could be followed by the comments from other people about previous comments, questions, answers, recommendations - and you get the ball rolling.

It’s up to you to decide, however, whether to post any particular comment on your blog or not. If the comment bashes another visitor or doesn’t add any value to your blog, why should you bother posting it? Simply delete it and the end of story.

And with blogs people tend to keep discussion close to the topic of the post, thus allowing you to maintain the theme in line with your concept.

Which of forum’s drawback haven’t I covered yet? Launch? Well, with blog it’s a breeze.
You’re not launching the place for interactive communication per se, you already have a blog. So you simply email your list and let them know that you provided them with a place to ask you questions.

You don’t have to bother whether you have a one question or dozen for this particular post. The blog won’t die as long as you’re posting new information on it. Some people will like one post, others will want to comment on another - and that’s how you get your interactive community, with little effort and no headaches!

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With the growing interest in blogging as a means of online promotion and branding, a lot of marketers are starting blogs to promote their opinions, products, books and services.

But a blog is like a website. “Write and they will come” isn’t exactly a magic formula to bring in traffic by the boatload.

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

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

1. Write Posts That People Will Want To Read

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

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

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

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

2. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

I cover this topic in detail in my article on “Search Engine Optimization For Blogs”

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

• Make sure your blog URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for
• Use your primary keywords in the title of your post
• Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post
• Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts

3. Submit Your Blog and RSS Feed To Directories

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

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

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

Another list of sites to submit your Blog

4. Ping The Blog Services

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

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

5. Build Links To Your Blog

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

• Link to your blog from each page on your main website
• Trackback to other blogs in your posts
• Post legitimate comments on other blogs with related topics
• Offer to exchange links with other similarly themed blogs and websites

6. Edit Your Blog Posts Into Articles

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

The suggestion for extending this to edit your blog posts into articles and submit them to directories came from the coach at “Explode Blog Traffic” who also has other noteworthy suggestions at his blog.

You’ll find an extensive list of article directories here

7. Create Buzz About Your Blog

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

• Create a controversy around your blog or it’s topic.
• Distribute bumper stickers or other merchandise with your blog’s URL and tagline.
• Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic.

8. Capture Subscribers By Email

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

Using a free service like Bloglet to manage your subscriptions is easy and it allows your subscribers to manage all their subscriptions from one interface.

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

RSS Responder is a new script that allows you to keep in touch and follow-up with your subscribers without the hassle of email.

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

—

Copyright © 2004 Priya Shah

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Priya Shah publishes an internet marketing ezine by day and doubles as a Blog Maniac by night. Blog Brandz is the legitimate offspring of her affair with the blogosphere.

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Web content for newspapers online has been limited to
repeating what paid staff writes for the print editions of
their papers or material coming from one or another of the wire services
to which the parent organization subscribes.

We’re all familiar with seeing Associated Press or Reuters
stories running in our local paper and posted online at
various news organizations. Imagine a news wire service for blogs which could
syndicate your blog to appear on online news sites. A new service called
BlogBurst has emerged to help bring blogging and news
together on the web sites of major media.

http://www.blogburst.com/

Blogburst makes the writings of a select group of bloggers
available to news organizations by aggregating the musings of
selected blog writers into a feed made available to major
papers. The news organizations can apparently choose from
among the topic areas and bloggers offered via the BlogBurst
feed.

Some bloggers have launched news commentary blogs with groups
of bloggers commenting on news. There already exist several
attempts to popularize what has become known as “Citizen
Journalism” by such notable groups as “We the Media and Dan
Gillmore’s Bayosphere which seems to have been taken over by
BackFence. Relevant links below:

http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism
http://www.bayosphere.com/blog/dan_gillmor/
http://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/index.cfm?mycomm=BA

What is often lacking for bloggers who provide commentary on the news is an
audience. Those experiments mentioned above have been available on small sites,
which are otherwise unknown to the world. Struggling to gain readers is the bane of
blogging, since people can’t read what they don’t know exists.

Some well known bloggers have found their audience through
writing compelling content and being discovered by major
media when they break their own news stories. Others gain
that audience through connections or through fame, but most
bloggers toil away daily for the pure love of a topic while
gathering small and loyal followings.

BlogBurst promises to make web content from the blogosphere
discoverable by the media by limiting the availability and
vetting the sources, so accuracy and truthfulness is
maintained and the blog can be trusted. It’s an interesting
experiment and may be the route to bloggers earning a living
from their blogs by gaining an audience they previously had
little access to - major newspaper web site visitors.

Since unknown bloggers appear to need the media in order to
spread the word (becoming well known in the process) and
newspaper web sites appear to want blogs associated with
their site, BlogBurst is filling that need. Since a lack of income
is what haunts many bloggers hoping to earn from their
commentary, BlogBurst will allow those bloggers to both reach
an audience and capitalize on their own traffic via their own
advertising, whether that is Google Adsense, Blogads, or some
other agreement with individual advertisers.

News sites have launched blogs written by volunteers, some
have offered staff journalists a blog, others have tried
allowing “Comments” from readers. But volunteers appear
unreliable, staffers have little incentive to blog without
pay and comment sections are subject to abuse by comment
spam. ZDNet is currently offering bloggers in popular
technology topic areas and is apparently providing payment
from advertising revenue generated by those blogs.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/

BlogBurst is taking an interesting approach by offering
online news organizations filtered and verified news
commentary from bloggers. Presumably, this content will be
available directly on the news sites, such as the
Washington Post, Gannet News sites, San Francisco
Chronicle and Houston Chronicle news sites.

BlogBurst is reviewing proposed blogs currently and will
announce the engagement in a live trial with major news sites
in May. Will the love of blogs by major media result in a
spring wedding? BlogBurst appears to be offering to serve as
minister to a marriage made in heaven. Stay tuned, to see
if this will be a long lasting marriage.

Mike Banks Valentine blogs on web content developments at
http://
weblogs.publish101.com and on web content and on privacy issues
for privacy blog http://PrivacyNotes.com/privacy_blog/
He runs web content distribution site http://Publish101.com

Although blogging has been around for some time now the use of
marketing and advertising in blogs is really catching on
throughout the world wide web.

There are an estimated 70 million blogs worldwide and while
these are blogs about any subject you could possibly imagine
wouldn’t it be great if you could capture 1% of those readers
attention and get them to visit your blog?

Technorati.com estimates that there are about 900,000 blog posts
every day which equates to 10.4 posts per second and that number
is growing as you read this article.

With what I just mentioned in the last two paragraphs is it any
wonder why marketers and webmasters are flocking in droves to
establish marketing blogs to attract new customers to their
websites in the hopes of converting them into customers for
their products or services.

Big Corporations such as General Motors, Boeing, and Google on
the blogging scene this really does appear to be a no brainer.
How do you make your blog stand out as an original worth reading
amongst all the others? Here are a few tips to get you started:

1) Make your blog an original by posting content that is written
or edited by you. Real people crave original content not
rehashed news that they heard on the radio or saw in the paper
yesterday.

2) Use a blog exchange service as a way of driving traffic to
your blog. There are free services as well as paid services. One
of my favorite low-cost blog/website traffic services is
www.ProClickEstate.com

3) Exchange blog or website links with other blog owners whose
blog content compliments your own.

4) Drive offline traffic online by using word of mouth as well
as business cards.

5) Make your blog stand out by using audio and/or video on your
blog and in your blog posts. Multi- media applications will keep
your readers coming back and prove that you take your blog
seriously.

These 5 strategies should get you started if you have not
already began blogging. Keep your blog strategy simple and your
content real & valuable. You will be growing your brand
recognition as well as a contact list of loyal and valuable
readers at the same time which is the bottom line to any
successful marketer.

Always market like a professional!

Copywrite 2006 Mark Brown

After you have clicked on the article link and before the text is fetched, you probably think — “What Do I think about this one?” You must have an opinion even though the issue (of blogging) is still fresh.

I would say; you need only one of them, if not neither.

You need an email newsletter in the case where you think that relationship management is a must for you business. This story didn’t change much. With a newsletter you are able to give prospects and clients valuable information that is not otherwise available. The newsletter should continue news, but also updates and other product information or discounts. Success stories may be included, etc, etc.

With a newsletter you show your public that you are still around. The frequency per issue may vary, but the credibility will increase when this frequency is constant. This requires hard work, and only liable companies are able to do this. This is why most people buy (on the internet); ninety percent out of trust.

If sales is not your first business priority, than you do not need an email newsletter. There are so many other specialized direct marketing companies and focused companies that you should better link to. And you do not even have to write them a letter, you ought to convince them that your service or product is a win for both.

If sales is not your first priority than you can do without a weblog too. There is no need for a weblog, other than that it is just fancy. Choose for one, if you think it will help your business.

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.
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