Imagine getting 100 FREE business cards, think I am crazy, right? WRONG! Ooprint, which is a really interesting name for a company, is offering their business cards for FREE, all you have to do to get 100 of them for FREE is to pay shipping. They have some preset templates that allow you to change tags around to your personal ones, and are very cool. Imagine if you meet someone in the real world, are you going to hand them your bland, ugly business card or are you going to give them a stunning Ooprint business card, you know the stunning Ooprint business card will get your blog another view in real life! Why not get 100 free, yeah I might be trying to sell this really hard but it is a great deal! Check out Ooprint if you want some great,nearly free, business cards!
The problem with so many “blog faders” is that they say they do not have enough time. Let’s be honest, if it took them ten minutes to setup a blog on a free host, why can’t they dedicate ten minutes a day or even ten minutes a week to work on their blog.
Blogging is EASY!
Seriously, if you think writing is difficult, blogging is not for you. Even if you write just 100 words a week, you will at least contribute something. Like I said above, it will take you all of ten minutes a day to write 100 words. Heck, if you are good at writing it might take you just five! Plus, Wordpress and other blogging solutions have extremely little maintenance, if you don’t have the time, just don’t upgrade!
Blogging is NOT stressful
As much as some people want to make you believe, how stressful is it to write? Poets, and Authors know that writing is a release for them. It allows them to spill their words into text on a screen or page. Writing takes them to a different place, where problems of the real world doesn’t affect them. You know what, imagine that for a moment….
Are you still with me? Good! Hopefully you can realize what I was trying to say.
Work on your Writing
Sure blogging might be easy but that doesn’t mean you should write like you are a first grader! Use spell check, which is conveniently found on all Microsoft Word applications by hitting “F7″. Also, if you are using Word as your blog editor of choice(I don’t agree with this but more on that in a future post), there is a somewhat useful grammar checker. Not that it will catch much, but it is better than nothing.
FireFox includes an on board spell checker. All you have to do is right click with your mouse and you can tell it to spell check a field, including your online blog editor.
Take the time and write yourself a great post. Writing is a great release and allows you to reflect upon previous events. I will be writing more posts in the future on how to improve your writing, it is a pet peeve of mine. Hope you all are having a non-stressful blog writing day.
IT IS IMPORTANT THAT BLOGGING IS NOT AN OBSESSION! If you are blogging 24 hours a day, you have a serious addiction. You need to move on with life, blogging is important but your real family and life comes before the internet.
I have read about RSS Hugger on many a John Chow, John Cow and even Blog About Your Blog. However, my main turn off of RSS Hugger was that an inclusion used to cost $20, and if you blogged about them it still cost $10. Well, little did we know but RSS Hugger lifted their $10 fee and is offering refunds to everyone who recently purchased this option. Now for just blogging about them RSS Hugger is hopefully going to give KrispyBlogs a free entrance! How generous, and just in time for the Christmas season. So check out RSS Hugger for your favorite little orange dude and a little more press about your RSS feed.
Oh, and a shameless self promotion, I got a giant new orange RSS button for you all to subscribe with and Feed burner is now gladly assisting with delivery of the Krispy Blogs feed.
Whenever you look at the top of the blogging world, you see people who are intertwined by both posts and friendship. The top bloggers are always quality, not quantity. However, the thing they do have a quantity of is friends, and a sphere of influence.
Gaining Friends
Gaining friends is not hard. I have not gained many friends through Krispy Blogs, but I have not been working towards it. Before blogging, I was involved in forums. I connected with many more people on a daily basis, but not quite as personally. Forums are great for those who want a true community and if you want to gain friends joining some blogging forums is a great way to start. PayPerPost Boards, GeekySpeaky, and Digital Point are all great places to join and most let you exchange links, and gain knowledge about the blogging world.
Communicating with Friends
Let me preface this, I have been on forums since back in 2003. I have been blogging since 2005. NEVER, have I had someone jump out and stay my friend. All my friends initially were against me, seriously! Sometimes your enemies can help you the most. First, please DO NOT ask your blogger friends to link or submit your post to a social networking site every time you make one. This is your #1 way to alienate your friends. Actually, here is a list of DO’s and DO NOT’s.
DO
- Private Message bloggers on forums to get their IM info
- Be Polite at all times
- Message your friends every once in a while
- Occasionally ask your friends to vote for your post on a social network
- Make Friends
- Talk with Friend’s Friends.
- Link back to your friends blog
DO NOT
- Say HELLO every time you sign in/your friend signs in(I learned this the hard way)
- Turn your friend into a voting machine for your use
- Message you friend on 3 different messengers
- Post your friend’s contact information on your blog
- Ask your friend to link to the 49 new blogs you just started
While most of these are common IM practices it is always good to review them. Oh, and did I nearly forget to say, DO comment on similar blogs, if you have worth while comments they will reply and you may get some great new friends.
Note: IZEA has released Real Rank, my editoral on it will come once a few days of data has been updated.
For any blogger who wishes to increase their search engine rankings, it is important to remember to optimize your blog. Think of Google as a skittish dog, at first it knows nothing of you and is very seldom happy with you. However, the nicer you are to the dog, the better attitude, and search results you garner.
Permalinks
When you use Wordpress the default link structure includes “?” and is very confusing to search engines such as Google. It is very hard for them to understand what exactly your post is about with some arbitrary number. To fix this you can change your permalink structure. First, go into your Administration panel, then Options and finally permalinks. Enter in /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/ for your permalink structure. This structure puts your post name first, helping search engines figure out what you are really trying to talk about.
Tagging
There is no reason not to tag if you have your installation of Wordpress running version 2.3 or above! Tagging is supported natively in your WYSIWYG editor, you just enter them below the post editing field and your done! If your not using Wordpress 2.3, I’d recommend upgrading immediately to the latest version of the 2.3 kernel (technical for upgrade to the latest release).
Appropriate Tags
With any article, you should pick tags that relate to the article. Do not put tags in that do not relate to your content, also do not put in every word of your article in the tags field. The tags field is small for a reason, to keep you focused on the important tags! Most often tags should be names, places, or phrases related directly to the article you are writing about.
Keywords
Having keywords that you want to achieve is a great idea. You should use keywords sparingly though, as using them too much can lead to search engines thinking you are “splogging”. Start off slow and gradually use your keywords more in your posts to get mentioned on the first page of Google results. Patience is key!
Useful Plugins
Wordpress has several plugins that can help you make Optimization a breeze! First, and really not a plugin but something you should be using is that tagging field in Wordpress 2.3. I have gotten thousands of visitors from just accurately tagging my blogs alone! I also recommend that you look into getting a Related Posts Plugin, something I added onto this blog tonight. Fairy Fish has a pretty good related posts plugin. All in One SEO pack also gives you some great resources.
It is possible to achieve the first page on Google for any keyword, it just requires some patience and a bit of skill!
My hair is really long right now. I have been trying to save up my money for my laptop and have been stretching the amount of time between getting haircuts, just because I don’t really want to go to get one and I am trying to save money. My neighbor went to hair school a couple years back and said she is willing to cut my hair for a few bucks. She is trying to make it as someone who owns a salon and that is really hard in Michigan with our horrible economy. Luckily, she got some great training up at Regency Beauty Institute in Minneapolis. Those people know what hair is! Well, I am going to give her a call in the mean time I will be posting a saved post as we return to off of rant about random things. Thanks for dealing with me.
I cannot get off this funk of ranking systems, URL trends is still lovely and I wish I could buy one of their accounts that lets me update my data 10,000 times a month, but somehow I don’t quite have that sort of budget. I think that we need to brand together as bloggers and all contribute to buying an account there, the biggest one possibly and we should all be alright. Come on, give me your donation at ryan at ryan444123 dot com. Thanks guys!
PayPerPost, I mean IZEA, is launching their new ranking system which will become an API tommorrow. I am going to be very intrigued to see exactly how all my blogs are ranked, and the awesome thing about the ranking system is that you can get your ranking without sharing any of your personal details, or if you wish you can share all of your personal details. This will bring a personal level to ranking most unlike that of Technorati who does a horrible job at blog ranking now!
I am going to be honest, I love checking things meticulously, stocks, prices, etc. One thing I haven’t checked in a very long time is the price of gold. I just checked it and it is above Google stock. Best of all, gold is currently down so it is a time to be a bull and buy buy buy some more Gold! Go Gold crazy. Well with Monex Deposit Company, they help you buy precious metals such as Gold or Silver. You can have your precious metals delivered directly to your home or have them securely stored at a bank or independent deposit facility. Buying Gold and having Gold has been seen as a status of wealth for centuries, don’t be left out buy some gold today! Get in on the really low price too, who knows when prices will dip back down!
I just was talking to Matt from Blog About Your Blog dot Com earlier and he was mentioning how he had rated the top 20 contest blogs on the internet similar to how someone rated the top blogs about blogging which Blog About Your Blog made along with some of the Pro Bloggers such as John Chow and the like. You might want to check out how he made his post here. This list is particularity helpful if you are trying to get your contest out there and contest blogger does not pick it up/you don’t want to pay $100 for contest promotion!
