Blog Content Provider .com

What’s up with MSN adCenter? http://tinyurl.com/3jlqnt

The Microsoft adCenterCommunity Blog has announced that it has added category listings to its blog. What do they want? Three cheers?

Blogs have had categories since the very beginning. It’s always been a great way to organize posts and make them easy to find for readers. Why is the Microsoft adCenterCommunity Blog just now adding categories and announcing as if it is some grand discovery?

If you write a blog of any kind and you do not organize your blog posts into categories then I recommend that you start doing this right away. Make it easy on your blog readers and on yourself.

There are two minds regarding current events on your business blog:

• Stay away from it.
• Embrace it.

I’m for exercising caution, but I’m also for going forward if there is a good reason to do so. The pros to discussing current events on your business blog are these:

• Potential for reaching a wider audience
• Achieving a different level of interest by rounding out your blog
• Can give you a more human appeal if done the right way
• Potential for ranking well for non-niche related keywords, which could lead to business through a “back door” marketing approach

The primary con to addressing current events is that you could alienate a part of your audience by taking a strong stand on a political issue. Of course, current events does not necessarily mean political. It could mean just about anything. For instance, if you write about a sports blog and you decide to write a few posts on a famous athlete’s dating life then it could add an additional flavor to your blog and help you reach a different audience. Could that help or hurt you?

It depends. Before deciding whether you want to take on current events writing with your blog, ask yourself these questions:

• What do I hope to gain by doing so?
• What are the dangers to doing so?
• Can I effectively gain what I want to by addressing current events?
• How can I avoid the dangers and still address current events while providing my blog readers with benefit?
• Can I tie the current event to an important topic related to the subject of my blog?

That last question is very important. If the answer is no then you should probably not write about current events on your business blog. But if the answer is yes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. You must also consider the other factors. Will you alienate a part of your readership by addressing current events? Will the controversy (if it controversial) help you or hinder you? Can you avoid potential dangers while providing benefit to your readers?

These are all important questions. At the end of the day, it is your decision, but you can gain some readership advantage by addressing certain current events on your business blog. Proceed with wisdom and caution.

This guest article gives a quick overview of making money from blogging. It doesn’t go into great detail, but you can get a good picture of what making money from blogging is really all about.

Can You Learn to Make Money From Blogs?

By Kevin T Hope

Blogs are becoming more and more popular on the web, and more and more people are realizing that blogging can become an income stream. There have been a lot of infoproducts released that are supposed to tell you how to make money from blogs, but the truth is most of them fall short. However, there are a few websites that can successfully show you a winning strategy.

But first let’s talk a little bit about blogs. Blog is short for weblog, which is an online journal-a way for people to express their own opinion on certain topics or may even be about themselves. Each blog is made up of just one web page and entries will then be posted to it on a regular basis starting with the most current addition at the top.

Many people now have their own blogs on the internet, covering a wide variety of subjects but some still have not actually realized that they can make money from blogging. There are several ways in which money can be made from a blog, so it is important to learn from someone who has done it, and can show you in an organized fashion how to go about it. The first step will always be to decide just what topic your blog is going to be about.

Ultimately, what you are aiming to do with your blog is gain the trust of those people who come to read it. Once you have been able to gain these peoples trust then they are much more likely to try any of the products that you are recommending to them.

When it comes to producing good quality blogs there is no better platform than Wordpress. There are different blogging platforms available for you to use, but Wordpress is the easiest of them all set up and customize. Blogger is also a very good solution, but most people who are making money from blogs will recommend Wordpress as their first choice.

When it comes to setting up a blog using Wordpress you will find that whole process very simple. But first you must register with the site and once this is done then you can start building your blog with them. In fact building the blogs will cost you nothing and will only take a few minutes for you to complete and then all you need to do is start adding some posts to it once it is up and running.

It’s important to post useful, interesting information on your blog. By following the system of successful bloggers, you will learn the best methods of generating content that keeps your viewers coming back.

It’s possible to make a good living online by following the footsteps of someone who has already done it. It helps you to avoid those mistakes which many novices make, and which end up wasting time and losing them money. By finding the right mentoring program you will learn about how to set up your blog correctly, selecting the right subject matter and the right products that you should advise to your visitors.

Want to Make Money From Blogs?

Get help at http://www.Squidoo.com/Blogging-Income

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kevin_T_Hope

Understand two things about blogging:

1. No. 1, you have to work hard to get to where you can quit your day job. Writing about something you are passionate about is the first step. But you also have to understand your target market. Are there other people as passionate about your topic as you are? If so, what do they want to know about your topic? Write for your audience, not yourself.
2. Secondly, writing a company blog is different than writing a blog that is a business plan itself. The two approaches are different, but they can both earn you money. You must define your business strategy. Are you writing a blog that is a business model on its own or are you using a blog as a marketing tool for your business? Both are good plans, but don’t mix them.

If you have an existing business and you want to market your business through a blog then you can learn more about how that works at Blog Content Provider. If you want to set up a blog as a business model on its own then let us consult with you.

Would you like to be a guest blogger? Want to build no strings attached links back to your blog or website? Instead of buying links, get them for free just by providing free to content to one of NameCritic’s many blogs. We have blogs on the following topics:

• Mortgage and Real Estate
• News and Media
• Blogging
• Article Marketing
• SEO
• Disaster Victims
• Runaway Teens
• Most Wanted Fugitives
• Things That Just Piss Me Off (Does something piss you off?)
• Humor (Wholettheblogout.com)
• For Sale
• Domaining

Click one of the above links and visit the blog. If you can see yourself having a byline at that blog and a link back to your own blog then contact us for a guest blogging opportunity you’ll be proud of.

Hey Tiger TeleServices, Some things are just so wrong they shouldn’t need repeating - or saying the first time, for that matter. Content theft is one of those. Blatant content theft is just plain nuts and you’d think that the content thieves would know that they’re going to get caught.

Who Is Tiger TeleServices?
Tiger Teleservices is a new SEO and blog ghostwriting company. You know they’re new because they have a gray bar for PR on the Google Toolbar. But another way you know they’re new is because their first blog post was made on September 13, 2008.

One of their blogging methods is to take a blog post from another company and copy it verbatim. They probably use a scraper. In this particular case they linked back to the company whose blog post they took, but they used the entire blog post and didn’t add anything of value of their own. That’s a problem for two reasons:

1. No. 1, it is stealing. They are trying to make a $$ off of someone else’s content by selling the same service as they writer of the original content.
2. Secondly, it doesn’t build trust in their services. If I was looking for a blog ghostwriter I would likely use the company that posted the original information, not the company that stole the content.

Finally, at the end of the post, Tiger TeleServices links from the stolen content to their own website, hoping to gain some additional business this way.

Tiger TeleServices’ Real Content Problem
But the blog is the least of the worries of Tiger TeleServices. If you go to their website then you’ll see static web page content that the company copied verbatim from Blog Content Provider and used for their own purposes. Same content. No changes. Verbatim. No attribution. Bad form.

Here’s the stolen content page at Tiger TeleServices website.

Here’s the original page posted at Blog Content Provider.

Click the links. You’ll see the similarities. And if you copy and paste the content into Google then you’ll see that Blog Content Provider ranks for the content. Tiger TeleServices does not.

We also tried contacting Tiger TeleServices to notify them of their illegal activity and to ask them to remove the content and write their own, but the phone number they have posted on their website didn’t even ring. Bogus number?

If you are the owner of Tiger TeleServices or know the owner of this company then please ask them to remove the content they took from Blog Content Provider and to write their own original content. It would be better for their business and ours if they wrote original content - and I’m sure the Tiger TeleServices’ customers would appreciate that too. We at BCP don’t like content thieves.

Every year, Technorati publishes its State of the Blogosphere report. While I don’t follow it religiously, I do think it provides some useful information. This year’s report tells a little different story than past reports have told. Here are some interesting stats in the first of the series (the report will be published as a series of five over the next few days):

• 63% of active bloggers are 25-44 years old
• U.S. bloggers have a higher education and earn more money than the general Internet population
• Bloggers are spread out geographically and not concentrated in large urban areas
• More than 50% of bloggers are non-U.S. residents
• More than 75,000 bloggers have a Technorati Authority over 50
• 45% of all blogs have a Technorati Authority of at least 1
• 46% of all bloggers are professional bloggers
• 12% of blogs are corporate blogs
• 51% of bloggers have set up more than one blog

Some of these measurements are difficult to analyze as a trend because Technorati didn’t measure them before now. But I like the 46% number for professional bloggers because that indicates a clear rise in professional blogging. I didn’t see a number for that category in last year’s report, but I’m quite certain that it wasn’t at 46%.

The growth of our own business since that time is an indication of that. Meanwhile, corporate blogs are growing too, but not nearly as fast as professional blogs on the whole. In October 2004, Technorati counted 5,000 corporate blogs. With Technorati tracking millions of blogs, that number has surely gone up since then. In April 2007, Technorati report tracking 70 million blogs, which would mean that 8.4 million were corporate blogs (12%) if the same percentage applied then (I’m betting that it was less than 12%).

What’s This Mean For Business Blogging?
So what does all of this mean? Well, I think it means two things for anyone in business who is also doing business online.

No. 1, it means that competition is growing. By this time next year there will be a number of competitors in your niche no matter what niche you are in and there will be more competitors than there are today.
No. 2, business blogging is an essential marketing tool. You can say that blogging is now mainstream. But not just blogging, business blogging. Every day, more and more business blogs come online. By this time next year, if you haven’t started a blog to promote your business then ranking well in the search engines for your important keywords will be much more difficult than it is today.

Orphans can make your headlines look awful. But you can get ride of them with one simple little piece of code and do away with orphans once and for all.

So, what are orphans? Orphans are a hanging, dangling word all by itself on the last line of your blog headline. They look atrocious and you’ll make your headlines look 100% better if your get ride of them. But how do you do that?

First, let me show you what an orphan looks like. Assume the sentence below is the title of a blog post:

This headline is designed to show you what an orphan looks
like

Not all lines in a blog post headline need to be equal length. You aren’t publishing a newspaper. But you don’t have to settle for orphans either. Now, you can rewrite a headline so that you don’t have orphans and that just requires taking away a word or adding new words so that you don’t end up with one word on a line. But what if you really love the headline you wrote and you don’t want to rewrite it? Well, just insert a line break tag in the middle of your headline where you want to break it up for the next line and that will kill your orphan. The line break tag looks like this:

< br >

but without the spaces.

Taking the above headline, you can kill the orphan - the word “like” in the second line - by inserting the br tag in the middle of the headline, like this:

This headline is designed to show you < br >what an orphan looks like
(remember, no spaces in the br tag)

If you do that then it will look like this:

This headline is designed to show you
what an orphan looks like

Much more attractive, right?

And, the best part is, you don’t have to mess with the optimization (you did write an optimized headline, didn’t you?). Now you know how to kill those little orphans.

There are essentially two approaches to blogging for business:

• The Carnival Barker Approach
• And the Dog Catcher Approach

The Carnival Barker’s Approach To Blogging

The Carnival Barker approach takes each blog post individually. Like a carnival barker you yell out in the crowd to random people passing by and invite them to play your game. You will use a different approach for every person who passes by because you know that all people have different personalities. What will work for one person won’t work for another, and vice versa. But you don’t know which approach will work for which type of person. You don’t know the personalities of the people passing by. All you see are random peeps.

Because you are operating in the dark with regard to the different personalities of the people you see, but you know that you have a handful of techniques that work for the personality types available, you decide to mix and match your techniques to see which targets you hit.

Keywords are the bloggers verbal barks. Each blog post should focus on one or two keywords. You are screaming at searchers in the search engines to come on over to your blog to see what you have to offer - “Come on! Play the game!” Not everyone, of course, will take the bait, but those who do will see an up-close-and-personal presentation after they’ve landed on your blog. Getting them to play the game is to have them click the link and go to your landing page - the one you want them to go to.

The Dog Catcher’s Approach To Blogging

The dog catcher is little more subtle than the carnival barker, but not as effective. The dog catcher tries to wrap a net around one specific dog. He’s after one little dog that the neighbors have been complaining about - that is, his CEO or marketing directory has a specific type of customer in mind and that’s the customer we should be going after. The problem with this approach is that it provides too narrow a scope for it to be effective.

Because the dog catcher has one target in mind for a product that has more than one target available, he does not target each individual blog post to different personalities or people with varying needs. He has a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach and though he might snag a few dogs he will never catch all of the animals in his neighborhood that can make his bosses happy.

Carnival Barker Bloggers Set Their Own Limitations

Instead of just chasing one or two dogs, why not try to snag as many different customers as you can using the carnival barker approach? That doesn’t mean that every blog post has to different every single day of the year. Limit yourself to a handful of tactics - 10-20 - and rotate them throughout the month and over the course of a year. You’ll find it to be far more effective than the old tired-out dog catcher approach to blogging.

Blogging has grown a lot since it was first introduced online. It has changed, but the fundamentals are the same. Businesses are using blogs ever more and to great effect. Below are three ways that you can use a blog to drive traffic to your website:

• Use your blog posts to promote specific pages of your website. Don’t link to too many pages in the same blog post. This strategy is best used as a minimalist approach. Focus on one - or two at the most - pages per blog post and link to that page once or twice. No more. Focus on another page in the next blog post.
• In your sidebar. Pick a handful of pages on your website to promote in your sidebar. Create sidebar links for those pages and that’s it.
• Use a signature link in your blog posts. In your signature link, include a link or two to specific pages on your website and try to make those pages relate to your blog post topic in some way.
• Instead of a signature link, add a banner at the bottom of all of your posts. Link the banner to a specific page on your website. You can even rotate banners from one post to the next depending on the topics you write about.
• Use your RSS feed to promote specific pages on your website. The number of people who will see these links will be limited, but you can use the links as an incentive to subscribe to your RSS feed. Make those links to special pages that offer a strong benefit and plug that benefit in your RSS feed promotional literature.

You can drive traffic anywhere you want it to go using these traffic-driving techniques. For more insight into managing a blog, check out BCP.