Bloggingtricks

There is an unfortunate practice known as splogging. People create splogs instead of sending spam e-mail. What do the two have in common? A Splog is a spam blog. They are used only for promoting affiliated websites or to improve search engine page ranking.

Typically the articles in Splogs are fake and simply intended to generate spam.

Fake blogs are harmful to the legitimate blogs and bloggers out there. If you're ever advised to splog or tempted to, remember, you'll be hurting everyone in the blogging community, including yourself.

Splogs rarely work and the harm they do far outweighs any potential short term gain they bring.

You can read more about Splogs at Wikipedia.

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If you're a corporate blogger, you might want to look at iUpload - Community Publisher. It is aimed at corporate clients and according to a recent Forrester Research study, iUpload scored highest among all corporate blogging platforms.




Some key features of iUpload:

Completely branded template libraries and UI
Turnkey, hosted platform running under your domain
Supports public and private communities
Customizable feature set for your bloggers
Advanced Editorial/Approval Mechanism
Integrated Ad Serving/Management
Guest Author/Quick post support
Supports thousands of bloggers

Even if you're not a corporate blogger, iUpload offers a full set of publishing tools for personal blogging. Their Personal Publisher product incorporates all the key features you might want.

I still prefer Blogger for newbies and WordPress for more advanced blogging, but then again, I am not running an enterprise-level blog for a big corporation. Check it out and if you have any experience with iUpload, let me know.

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While blogging is an online activity, one of the best ways to promote your blog, get new material for your blog and improve your blog is to participate in a traditionally offline activity called networking.

This can mean going to conferences, local service clubs and networking groups. The latter can be tough. There are all kinds of networking groups out there. Some good, some not so good. A great one that you can join no matter where you live is called Biznik - business networking.

I am an active member of Biznik (it's free to join) and I have met lots of interesting people through the group. I am a blogger there too. And by linking to and from Biznik and Biznik member sites, I increase my blog traffic. I also get to know people either through online chats or by attending and hosting meetings. Each time I interact, I share information about my blogs and that increases traffic.

I've also met people at Biznik who've provided me with information I used to research and write some cool blog posts.

If you want to improve your blog, consider Biznik or some other local group where you live.

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Changing horses in the middle of the stream can be dangerous. So can changing your syndication feed. People rely on syndication to find your blog. Do yourself and your readers a favor. Only promote one feed.

If you start with one feed, switch servers or blogging platforms, and end up with a new feed, you will break your old feed making it very hard for people to find you. It's also confusing if you promote both feeds unless you update both.

If you have a different feed for every blog post (I have seen some people who actually advocate this) you're never going to build an audience.

So promote just one feed for your blog and stick with it.

Unfortunately, there are times when you have no choice and you have to switch feeds. If you use a service like Feedburner, you can use their tools to notify readers of feed changes.

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I've been studying corporate blogging for the past two weeks. It's been fascinating to see how big companies approach blogging. It's much like their approach was to the Web. They're waiting. And Watching. And forming committees. And eventually they'll stick their toe in.

This causes me to ponder...are big companies afraid to lead? Why is it that the little guy/gal has taken to blogging and the big guys/gals are afraid?

You'd think that the big companies would want to lead. But so far, with few exceptions, they're strictly followers.

One company Sun Microsystems, isn't afraid. There's a great AP wire story in the Seattle Post Intelligencer about corporate blogging that I can highly recommend.

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I came upon a new service over the weekend that you may want to investigate. It's called SimplyHeadlines.com.

SimplyHeadlines is a once a day email newspaper. It formats RSS feeds like a newspaper. It delivers them to a standard e-mail account. It doesn't stop there. It even allows you to configure the feeds for your Blackberry or other mobile readers. You decide exactly what type of news you care about. You pick:

*Where your headlines come from
*How many there will be
*At what time of day they will arrive
*The order in which they will appear

And for the RSS enlightened, you can add any valid RSS feed to your daily paper. No software to install - it's basically an email RSS reader.

Some users are afraid of RSS or simply unfamiliar with it. SimplyHeadlines allows readers to gather your content in a familiar place; their e-mail box.

I have now added this as an option on all of my blogs and I like it so much I may start using it as my feed reader.

If you'd like to sign up for a SimplyHeadlines account and add BloggingTricks.com as one of the feeds you want delivered, click the button below.

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Scott Bourne talks about audio blogging with AudioBlogger.

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While blogging is incredibly popular, some companies have taken the same wait-and-see approach to blogging that they did the Web.

And because many companies have missed their chance to be industry leaders when it comes to social media, some have just given up and decided not to try.

I think this is a mistake. The blogosphere is still growing. Last year, there were eight million blogs according to Technorati. This year there are nearly 30 million. The people who said the market was saturated at eight million were obviously wrong. So are those who say it's saturated at 30 million.

If your company has a sincere voice, can offer real value and will act with transparency, its blog can still be a hit.

This blog started only a few months ago. Yet, out of 30 million blogs, it's among the 200,000 most popular according to Technorati. Some of my blogs like PodcastingTricks.com are in the top 100,000. That doesn't sound like such a big deal until you realize that is out of 30 million blogs.

So you don't have to be top dog to be relevant. You just have to make the top quarter million or so.

There's a new blog created every second. How about yours?

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With 75,000 new blogs being created each day, no matter what the topic, there's a great chance that your blog competes with many others. That shouldn't bother you. It should inspire you.

Use RSS feeds, search engines, social media bookmarking sites like Digg and Blogpulse to monitor mentions of your competitor's blogs. Then see what they're doing. If they have good success with an idea, chances are it would work for you too.

Put your own spin on things. Keep your own authentic voice, but learn from your competitors. They can be a great source of ideas.

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I'll be slowing down my posts to this blog effective this week. I have been posting daily and will now post three days each week. The new posts will appear on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from now on. Is this blogfade? Nope. I have been asked to do some corporate blogging for a client and that will take some of the time I devoted to BloggingTricks.com.

I cover this issue in my post entitled "How Often Do You Blog."

I think it's more important to be consistent than anything else so when you change, do what I am doing now. Don't try to slip it past your audience. Tell them what you're doing and why. Manage their expectations. If they're reasonable people, they'll probably understand.

In my case, I have a paying gig that's interrupting my schedule. Most people will understand something like that. Maybe your situation is as simple as you're sick, or tired, or now that school's started you have less time. Whatever the issue, share it with your audience. That's the blogging way.

So in this post I am accomplishing two things. I am letting you know that I am changing the schedule from seven days per week to three. I am also teaching you that it's okay to change your posting schedule. Whether you are posting more or less often, be sure to tell your audience about the change. Blogging requires a certain amount of transparency. Your audience will appreciate the fact that you kept them in the loop.

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If you want to make money with your blog, you might use AdSense from Google to deliver relevant ads in exchange for click-through fees. But there is another service you might also consider from Yahoo called the Publisher Network. It's in beta but is shaping up to work similarly to AdSense. You can apply for the Yahoo Publisher Network beta here.

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Not that any of the inbred righties or Log Cabin republicans like Jim Queen will care, but it was a REPUBLICAN Justice appointed to the US Supreme Court by a REPUBLICAN President who cast the deciding vote in the recent eminent domain controversy.

I so hate to spoil the fantasy world of some of you troll fucks with facts, but every once in a while, you cowards have to have a little truth served to you.

Most people use Blogger, WordPress or TypePad to host their blogs. This means that most blogs look alike. Everyone is drawing from the same pool of templates. If you want to set yourself apart from every other blog out there, don't just use one of the standard templates offered by your blog host.

Here are some additional template sources.

Blogger
http://blogtemplates.noipo.org/
http://www.isnaini.com/blogger-templates/
http://www.geckoandfly.com/blogspot-templates/

Movable Type
http://blogtemplates.noipo.org/

WordPress
http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/styles.php
http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/comprehensive-list-of-615-free-wordpress-15-and-20-themes-templates-available-for-download-266.htm

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If you're one of those rare bloggers who blogs several times a day, be sure to space out your posts. You don't want to put five posts up in a one hour period, call it a day, and later find out that something of great import happened AFTER your last post.

If you need to write ahead, just change the time stamp so it at least looks like you spread out your thoughts.

You can space your posts even if you write daily or weekly. And you can do it even if you write in advance. Just make sure to change the date and time stamp in your blogging platform.

In Blogger, you do this by clicking open the Post and Comment Options tab right about the Save as Draft button.

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Almost 100 people voted and the results are in. Typepad is the clear winner in this poll. I must admit that with Blogger and WordPress being free, I didn't think a paid blogging platform would win. (Typepad cost at least $4.95 per month or $49.50 if you pay for a year.)

All of these platforms are good and you can't really go wrong with any of them.

Be sure to vote in the new poll. Do you accept comments on your blog?

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I've written before about the need for inbound links in order to stir up some Google juice. But how do you get those links? There are several places that you can approach for links that might not immediately cross your mind. Here are five ways to build more inbound links.

1) Join the local Chamber of Commerce. They often provide links for their members.
2) Join the Better Business Bureau. They too offer a program that links to members.
3) Sign up to be an approved federal government vendor. This will automatically place a link to your site from the government's web site.
4) Join a networking group like Biznik and let them know you have a blog. Most networking groups have a member links page.
5) Launch an affiliate program. Most links you receive won't have SEO value, but the added exposure will lead to additional "normal" links.

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While they're not as relevant as they used to be, there's still some value to using Meta Tags on your blog template.

If you use Blogger, you can access the template by clicking on the Template Tab. A few lines down from the top, you'll see the code

[$BlogMetaData$]

Replace that with meta tags.

As an example, I have included the meta tags for my podcast site, the iLifeZone.com. (NOTE: Wherever you see a left bracket [ insert the < symbol. Wherever you see the right bracket ] insert the > symbol.

[META name="description" content="The home of the iLifeZone podcast. A Podcast for Apple Macintosh users."]

[META name="keywords" content="mac, ilife, macintosh, macbook, powerbook, GarageBand, podcast"]


[META name="author" content="Bourne Media Group - Scott Bourne"]

You might want to ask your Internet service provider or programmer for help with if you don't want to work with the template on you own.

A word of advice: Back up your template before you make changes. You can do this by copying the text from your template onto your clipboard and then pasting it into an email to yourself.

In order to check the effectiveness of your meta tags, visit Widexl Internet Solutions' free Meta Tag Analyzer to see how your site rates.

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MOBLOGGING: Posting to a blog on the go. You're probably not like me. You probably take vacations and do things that don't involve your computer. But what if you want to still maintain your blog while you're at the beach. You can. You can post from a cell phone or other handheld device.

The concept revolves around using photos to tell a story. You can also remotely post text via many of the standard blogging platforms like Blogger.

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