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Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing, Planning

Robert and Maryam are speaking on getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network.

1) Blog because you want to. A story without live is not worth telling. Maryam talks about how Robert kept pushing her to blog for four years. Then one day, she started to blog. As soon as she started, she was blogging about Robert and he tried to get her to stop talking about him on her blog.

If you are blogging about something you don’t really care about because you think it’s profitable, you won’t have passion to go long-term.

2) Read other blogs. Use Technorati to find blogs that are similar to the topics you want to discuss, pick up writing styles, and learn about your competitors. If you read 50 blogs in two weeks and you aren’t compelled to answer back the things that you are reading, you probably won’t be a good blogger.

Maryam started blogging because she was going to a lot of conferences, but people told her they had no way of linking to her. It brings out community and a bond that she hadn’t experienced before. Through blogging she has gotten a much better job and has made a lot more friends. She loves it.

3) Pick a niche you can own - be different. There are two kinds of bloggers - ones that want to make things, and shake things. Others just want to talk to their friends and use their blogs to post baby pictures, talk about books they read, etc. Either way, each group should have a common set of values. When Robert visited people outside of Silicon Valley, he studied the way people use their computers. People go to Google and search for Yahoo because they want to get to Yahoo. Same for Yahoo, one of their top terms is Google.

Normal people outside the tech world aren’t using things like Google Maps, Google Groups, or Picasa. Everyone comes at this world through the search engine, so how do they interact with that?

Question - if you were to pick a category to be different in, would that be the tech category? Yes, it would be hard, but Mike Arrington came in late to the game and went to number one. He was also very focused on a very specific part of the tech industry, being Web 2.0.

There was a niche blogger in London who talks about the London Underground transportation system. After the London bombing, everyone hit her site, and now she is popular. Of course, we don’t want to have a terrorist act happen to make us famous, but you get the point.

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Blog Business Summit: What’s Next In Online Communication?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Design, Features, Marketing, Planning

Jeremy Pepper, Jeanette Gibson, and John Starweather

How does Cisco manage relationships with End Users when there is a reseller middle man?

By providing them a unique way to interact with the company online. They can log in and get a personalized view, along with interactivity.

Can they talk about steps they are taking to educate employees internally about the potential for engagement, so that they understand the impact of blogs, podcasting, etc.?

To educate, you need to have some good data so that you can show how influence really moves across the Internet, and how something you might post online actually reaches customers and hits the community. Cisco puts a blog, podcasting, and news section on their Intranet system, so global employees can all get to that information easily.

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How To Determine Your Link Popularity

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Planning

A great metric tool for a webmaster or site owner is knowing how popular and important their pages are to search engines. A great tool for figuring this out is the Site Explorer utility available from Yahoo!. What Site Explorer does is give you a listing of all indexed pages within a site, in order of importance. You can use this to see what subjects you should cover on a more regular basis, and also can use it to spark some creativity. For example, if you know that two really old pages are highly popular, you may want to highlight them in a new post, or in a dedicated “Hot Stories” section on your site. This helps new readers find your popular content without having to go through a search engine.

The video above gives you a look at the Site Explorer tool, and gives a bit more information on link popularity.

Read More | Yahoo! Site Explorer

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The Low Down On Web Page HTML Titles

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Design, Planning

For those looking to build up their own website from scratch, I think it might be worth your while to check out the video above for a couple of pointers if you are a novice. HTML titles are an important step to make sure you cover, because this is how search engines will identify you to potential visitors who find your site through a search query. This video shows what to look for and how to make sure your page titles are up to snuff.


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Is Your Online Business A Hobby Or A Real Business?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Planning, Productivity

A common question today is: “Why aren’t I making any money from my web site?” The main reason for this lack of success is that there are too many hobby sites rather than real business sites on the internet.

Your web site is a hobby business when:

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Things To Consider Before Redesigning Your Website

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Design, Features, Planning

It’s a familiar story. Your Web site was designed around the time when an upstart named Google was just getting their foot in the door of the Search Engine market. At the time, it was a great Web site. It might have even had some cool new features like some JavaScript rollovers or maybe even some Flash.

Unfortunately, times change. Those image rollovers that you used to think were innovative are now horribly outdated and your competition seems to have redesigned their Web site about every 6 months since yours went live several years ago. It’s time to redesign.

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Things To Consider Before Starting An Internet Business

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Planning

Before you trade in your job or profession for the opportunity to make your fortune online, it might be a good idea to take a closer look at what you are considering. You may not be as prepared as you think you are.

The lure of cyberspace as a place where one can become wealthy virtually overnight, and enjoy a life of leisure and financial freedom, has caused more shattered dreams and disillusionment than it has delivered happiness and prosperity.

Many would-be entrepreneurs today are licking their financial wounds, wallowing in self-pity, and pointing accusing fingers squarely at the nebulous scapegoat they call the Internet. Somehow in the lineup of usual suspects, details like inadequate preparation, inferior marketing and misguided ambitions were conveniently overlooked.

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Incorporation: Right For Your Business?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Features, Legal, Planning

For anyone starting up his or her own business, an understanding of business incorporation is must. While there are both pros and cons in taking this step for your business, you want to be sure that whichever side you fall down on, you are making an informed decision that will ultimately result in the flourishing of your endeavors.

The first stage in establishing any business entity is to decide the legal structure this will take. These structures range from sole proprietorship to several types of corporation, and the form you select will depend largely on your business intentions. A small business, owned by a single person, is generally run as a sole proprietorship, and though there are few tax benefits to operating in this way, there is also far less paperwork involved in establishing operations. Incorporation is most suited to larger operation, owned by two people or more, who wish to protect their personal assets, enjoy a multitude of tax benefits and find new ways to raise capital in the future.

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Using del.icio.us For Research

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Business Tools, Planning

When it comes to business, there are thousands of entities which would be happy to take your cash in order to provide you with consulting services, analytical services, informational services, etc. The alternative is finding free tools on the internet that you can use to your advantage. One such resource is del.icio.us.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

So, basically del.icio.us is a collection of bookmarks which other users have saved to their profiles. All bookmarks are public, and organized by tag. This is the interesting part. Tags are one-word descriptors that one adds to their bookmarks. For example, if I found a website about buying Yahoo domains, I could save that in my del.icio.us profile and tag it with the word “domain”. Alternately, if I am really interested in Yahoo, I could tag it with both “yahoo” and “domain”. Aside from that link showing up in my personal profile under those tags, they are also now available to anyone who looks up the tag on del.icio.us.

Say I want to find out about marketing. I can hit Google and try typing in the word marketing with a bunch of other terms, and then dig through the results. It sounds like a reasonable way to do it, but I would much prefer using del.icio.us to look up the marketing tag. This is because I know that the links that del.icio.us gives me are those that others found useful. The formula for looking up a tag on del.icio.us is “del.icio.us/tag/PutTermHere”. So if I wanted to look up bookmarks that users put into the marketing tag, I would point my browser to http://del.icio.us/tag/marketing. Give the link a click and see what you come up with. If you want to look up AdSense resources, you would look at http://del.icio.us/tag/adsense.

This is a case where you have the community working together to find the cream of the crop on the internet. Check out del.icio.us the next time you want information on any subject at all. Let us know what gems you find.


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50 Smartest Things To Do With Your Money

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Planning

A few weeks ago, we brought you the most expensive statements of success. Well, in order to gain enough cash to invest in a mansion or yacht, you need to handle your money wisely. CNN Money has come up with a list of “The 50 Smartest Thing To Do With Your Money”, looking at options for investing, saving, and buying real estate. It’s a good read to keep you grounded when you are staring a $5,000 affiliate check in the face, thinking of all the ways you can spend it on “fun”. When it comes to business, slow and steady wins the race.

Read More | CNN Money


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