Being a blogger requires many different talents. There has been a lot of talk lately about the fact that bloggers should also be engaged in social activities. If you start a brick and mortar business, then whoever drives by or walks by, will see your store. On the other hand, if you have a blog and do not advertise, then you are not going to be visible at all. One of the best ways to market your website is to get involved in networking. You need to know some influential webmasters that will help you in different ways, including linking to your site. The more people link to you, the higher your pages will appear in the search results. This way you will have more visitors coming to your site as well.
Networking is an important aspect of blogging, and one of the ways to have contact with other blogger is through social networks. One main problem with social networks is that they attract people with different interests. Fortunately, there are more and more social networks being created that cater to particular interest groups. Actually, there is an interesting social network that is targeted at Internet marketers and bloggers, namely socialauthority.ning.com. This is a good opportunity to get involved right now, and who knows who you might meet there. Maybe it will be someone who will share his knowledge with you, or you will get the support of the people who share your passion and will help you with their guidance.
Looking on maps on the Internet like, for example, Google Earth are a great way to study geography, check your directions before driving, or to simply look at your neighborhood to see how it looks like from a very far distance. I have always loved maps and found them to be very entertaining to look at. I know that a lot of people feel the same, and would spend hours looking at their neighborhood on Google Earth. Some of them would be hoping to find a better place to go on walks, or maybe finding a shorter way to drive to the supermarket. It can be very addictive to become a user of online maps, because they do not cost anything and are very practical. It is also fun to visit famous places in the world, such as Paris, Rome, London, or Moscow. Try to do it yourself, especially if you have never tried it yet. I am sure that you will discover that you love it. Google Earth is not the only map on the Internet that shows the pictures taken from a satellite. There is also NASA Terra, MapQuest, and surely many more. However, Google Maps are the most popular and are probably going to be for some time.
I found a rather original website that offers some funny cartoons that you can post on your blog without paying anything. I think that using images is a good idea for bloggers, as some people are a lot more responsive to images than to text. Actually, I have seen a cartoon from this website on another blog, and I thought that it was quite funny. I just want to give an example how you can incorporate such cartoons in your posts:
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
I am sure that a lot of your readers will like the cartoons.
I know that many Internet users are interested in making some extra cash. That is why I am going to discuss a company that might allow you to earn some money. TreasureTrooper is an interesting website that will pay you for completing offers and filling out daily surveys. You get paid for each offer from $0.25 to $40, and there are hundreds of offers. There are quite a few people that earned at least $100 the first month. For the most part, it is very easy to complete the offers, and that is why I claim that this is an excellent opportunity for many people. An example of an offer would be to sign up for a free 30 day trial of Efax, and get paid $7.50, or sign up for a free credit report, and get paid $9.00. There are also opportunities upon which completion you will get paid even more, but some of them might require an investment. If you run out of the top paying offers, there are many that will pay you $0.25-$1 for completion. On top of that, you can complete a daily survey for ~1$. You can also get involved in cash back shopping, where TreasureTrooper will return some portion of money you spend at selected online shops. You will also be earning gold coins that can be used to purchase �goodies� at Mabutu’s Trading Hut, but if you do not want to, you can just earn dollars.
Having your blog on your own domain might be a deciding factor whether or not you are going to be a successful blogger. It is for some time now that I have been thinking about migrating to another domain. To do it of course I need to find a suitable hosting that will give me everything that I want for my blog like enough disc space, bandwidth, site builder for which I will not have to pay additionally and a lot more. Having a blog is a big responsibility, but it can also be rewarding. If you are looking for domain and web hosting, you should not have problems finding them whenever you want it. Many people make the job of bloggers a lot easier. They offer bloggers and webmasters packages that can help them start a blog or website from scratch in a matter of minutes. I cannot stress enough the importance of reliable web hosting. If you are going to get stuck with a bad hosting provider, you might regret it for a long time.
Let us say that you are a video enthusiast who likes creating video for the fun of it. You would also like many people to see your videos. What if you are a poet or writer who likes to write after he comes from work? It may not be easy to publish a book, but you would probably like other people to see what you have written. What can you do in such a situation? An inexpensive way to distribute content is through torrents. Torrents are a relatively new way of sharing files and they already being used regularly by millions of Internet users. Sharing files with torrents is so easy, because you use your own bandwidth to distribute the files. The bandwidth of anyone else who is downloading is also being utilized, so this way you do not have to pay for hosting your files. Using torrents does not cost any money and there are many torrent clients that perform their job very well. Files downloaded using torrents are very rarely corrupted, a lot less often compared to traditional ftp downloads. It is also possible to resume downloading files, so you do not have to download a file during one session. All of these advantages are the reason why torrents are so popular.
There are many services being offered that advertise that they are able to spot plagiarism, and some of them are even free. However, I would like to present you with a very simple method. First of all, the word.plagiarist is derived from the latin word ‘kidnapper’, and it basically means that a person takes credit for someone else�s work. If you do not want anyone else to take credit for your work, you can use the Google Search engine in order to find if any of your articles are on other people�s websites. To do this select some parts of your articles and copy/paste them to Google. Look carefully at the search results to see what websites are listed there. Remember do not make accusations before you make sure that someone indeed copied your articles.
Of course, searching for plagiarism using a search engine might take a lot of time. Nonetheless, it is an excellent solution for those who do not wish to pay for similar services. Those who do not wish to pay may also consider using Copyscape, as it allows a limited number of searches per day for free. Whatever you choose, make sure that no one is copying your content without permission.
Until very recently bloggers were relatively unknown and they did not have such a big influence. Times have changed though, and there are hundreds of thousands of active blogs and bloggers. There are some bloggers that are very well known and respected. Many of them can compete with major newspapers, and have thousands of subscribers. That is because blogs besides giving out valuable information can also achieve one other thing that newspapers cannot � provide a sense of belonging to a community.
Most bloggers are writing their own articles and quoting only small amount of text in their posts. On the other hand, some bloggers are posting large chunks of articles from newspapers. This in turn has encouraged subscriber newspapers to form The AP, which uses the Attributor to detect copied content from newspapers. If you write your own articles you do not have anything to worry about; however, if you are copying large amount of text from popular newspapers you may get caught. Writing your own articles is very rewarding, so I encourage you not to copy text from anywhere else, unless you want to quote some short paragraphs for various reasons. After all, we want bloggers to have good reputation and to be respected.
It seems that some websites are blocking search engines from spidering some parts of their sites. This includes website like Craiglist and Del.icio.us.
Last year, for example, many SEO websites were reporting that Yahoo has blocked other search engines from accessing certain links on Del.icio.us. What did it mean to an average Internet user? I do not think it really had such an impact, although it might have been a problem for webmasters who were receiving many backlinks from Del.icio.us in hopes to improve their site rankings. Those of us who had many incoming links from Del.icio.us might have noticed less links being indexed by Google. Since PageRank is determined by the number and quality of links, having less links might have even resulted in Page Rank dropping on some of the websites.
This situation only proved that our marketing and promotion strategy should be diversified. It should include many different websites from which we hope to receive links from. If you advertise using many different methods, then you reduce the chance of anything going wrong. After all, there is very small probability that all of your marketing methods will stop working at the same time.
There are a lot of blog directories worth submitting your blog to. Many of them are still accepting new websites, while some of them no longer exist. To save you some time, today I am going to present various directories and toplists that have worked and have accepted new members during the last few months. Here they are:
www.blogtoplist.com
www.blogratedirectory.com
www.topblogarea.com
www.blogging.blogranking.us
www.blogrankers.com
www.besthyip100.com
www.worldtopblogs.com
www.aliciadamita.ontoplist.com/join.php
www.topbloglists.com
Usually, the difference between directories and toplists is that to get most out of a particular toplist you are required to put its widget on your site. Fortunately, they do not take a lot of space. Once you put a widget on your site, every time a person visits your blog a particular toplist is going to register it. As a result of this, you are going to climb higher and higher in its rankings. When it comes to directories, you do not need to place any widgets. By simply submitting your site to them you will get a linkback and possibly a lot of unique visitors to your blog.
If some of the directories or toplists mentioned above do not work anymore please let me know by leaving a comment.