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Last Thursday I published an article titled
Having an Opinion: The Secret Sauce for a Popular Blog. Today I want to talk about the other side of that coin.
As we discussed in that previous article, expressing one’s opinion clearly and strongly can be the secret to generating a lot of buzz and traffic. As you also know, on the Internet pretty much anyone can setup a website and publish his own content in a matter of minutes.
Put together those two ingredients and the result could be someone doing a lot of damage to your online reputation. In order words, the easier for people to express their opinions and to share those with a large number of people, the higher the important of managing your reputation online, and this point is valid for pretty much anyone using the web, from business entities to bloggers and individuals.
Not convinced this is important? Suppose you have just published an ebook or released a web service. After a couple of days one client gets really upset about the quality offered, and decides to write a chaotic review about it. Should some people link to his review, there is a great chance that his post will show up in the first page of Google for the name of your ebook or service, and now the damage is done. Potential clients that end up reading that bad review will stay clear from purchasing your product.
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Chitika have been rolling out their
new CPM ads over the last few days. These impression based ads will appear mainly on sites with a lot of traffic from non supported countries (they only serve their own ads to traffic from USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK).
In a sense these CPM ads are ‘alternative ads’ - so if a reader comes from Japan for instance they see the new CPM ad instead of a default ad or a Public Service Announcement. The theory is that at least you’ll earn something from the ad.
I can understand why Chitika are doing this and why it’d be attractive to many publishers. Most sites get at least some decent traffic from the countries that Chitika (and other ad networks) don’t support and to not monetize it is a pity. However….
What concerns me a little about these ads is that the announcement post says that it’s not just when someone from a non supported country visits your site but rather they say they serve them ‘when it makes sense’ to do so and give this example:
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Blogs are a great way to make money online. However, sometimes the money is made not from direct methods like
Google Adsense or
affiliate marketing.
Sometimes, all you need a blog for is to grow your personal brand as a guru or an expert and the money comes in many, many other ways.
I’m releasing the theme I use for my
work-at-home blog as
The Guru Theme so you can use it on your blog too. I basically created space for a bigger blog header, which is necessary if you want to band yourself well.
This simple theme is perfect if:
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I’m starting a new course this week (as a student) - it’s called WebVideo University.
Over the past 6 or so so months I’ve been experimenting more and more with using Video on my blog. It started out with just an experiment or two but the response from readers was so encouraging that I set myself the goal of running weekly (or as it turned out every second week) video posts.
Like I say - the response has been wonderful - there have been numerous benefits:
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As you know I write a lot about the power of social media to help you build your reputation online.
One of the case studies I share in my speaking about social media, personal branding and career success is of my good friend and mastermind buddy
Jessica Bowman who is an SEO expert.
After relocating across the US, taking up a role at
Yahoo, Jessica lost her role in the recent massive shakedown to everyone’s surprise in just 90 days after taking up her appointment.
Jessica has a blog that is well regarded in her field of expertise and as she has been providing excellent advice and tips there, she is well known by key influencers in the world of SEO.
This has led to her story and how she has successfully managed career transition since leaving Yahoo to be picked up by a major US glossy where she will be featured in their July edition (sorry can’t tell you who until she makes it public) and she is attracting great opportunities from consulting to speaking, all through her network both online an offline.
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Bloggers and webmasters know that every single visitor helps to build up traffic, right? If that is the case, you should make sure that Google is correctly indexing your images, and that people searching for related image terms will have a chance to visit your blog.
Here is a quick check that you can perform to find that out. Just head to Google, and click on the “Images” link on the top left corner. That will take you to the Image Search. Now you just need to type on the search bar “
site:yourdomain.com“. This quiery will filter only the results coming from your site.
If your images are getting indexed correctly by Google you should be able to see a whole bunch of them on the search results.
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Here is a cool
WordPress themes developer who has managed to design some really nice and clean looking themes for WordPress.
Graph Paper Press WordPress themes are versatile enough to suit most needs and feature some cool looking magazine style themes.
From what I have seen, their themes are all customisable and you can create your very own show piece blog on the web for free or for a reasonable fee.
Monochrome Gallery is a free theme that supports Ajax powered featured posts on the home page. A great way to showcase the best you have with the help of images.
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If you are not using a social networking tool, then most likely you feel pretty ancient right now. Just about everywhere we look these days, social networking sites envelope us. As a matter of fact they slowly choke us to death or at least that is how it feels with the burden of having to join this and that site.
If you don’t
twitter, you are simply not cool these days. Alternatively, if you are not part of MySpace you are not in the loop.
Stumblers are also a force to be reckoned with, especially for bloggers. But who says so anyway?
Perhaps the millions of people who join these sites every month to converse with like minded people world wide. Or else the trend setters. Who knows, but what is clear is that social networking is robbing us of our time.
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Editor note: I considered breaking this post down in more parts, but I will rather publish it in its integrity. It is always better to have all the information on a single page, so that you can bookmark it and consult later.
Every day, millions of bloggers post content online. Millions more people read and comment on blogs. With all that communication, some interesting legal issues are bound to arise. This article looks at 10 major legal points that bloggers must know and offers some suggestions about how to work with them.
1.
Develop a “legal consciousness” about blogging. Like any publications, blogs frequently create legal questions. However, there is no need to fear those issues. Instead, being aware of the possibility of such concerns will help you identify them and manage them effectively. This article presents some of the most common legal issues that arise.
As you read it, consider how those issues apply to your blog. Also, it is good to develop the habit of looking for legal questions as you post new content on your blog. Using the major points in this article as a guide, you can ask yourself, “Are there any potential legal problems here?” whenever you update your blog. This simple practice will help you identify important legal questions and resolve them before they have a chance to cause problems.
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Written by Daniel Scocco · Filed Under top tips | Comments Off
This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger -
Speed Posting.
I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my Twitter followers in no more than 3 minutes per post. I then handed each post over to readers for them to continue to posts.
The Results? Well I had a lot of fun, got some good feedback from those Twitter followers who asked the questions, and there were a lot of great comments left.
Lastly - I wrote the following 19 posts. I hope you enjoyed them and will stop by those you feel you’ve got something to say on and add your thoughts.
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Blogs are a great way to make money online. However, sometimes the money is made not from direct methods like Google Adsense or affiliate marketing.
Sometimes, all you need a blog for is to grow your personal brand as a guru or an expert and the money comes in many, many other ways.
I’m releasing the theme I use for my work-at-home blog as The Guru Theme so you can use it on your blog too. I basically created space for a bigger blog header, which is necessary if you want to band yourself well.
This simple theme is perfect if: Read more
Monochrome Gallery is a free theme that supports Ajax powered featured posts on the home page. A great way to showcase the best you have with the help of images.
Read more
