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Video Comments on WordPress Blogs

Wow, this is something that I was not expecting, but it does make sense. TechCrunch and several other blogs announced that they already have a plugin installed to allow readers to post video comments. In fact if you head to that post you will be able to see dozens of examples, including some from Mike Arrington himself. The WordPress plugin was released by Seeismic, who will also be hosting the videos. You can decide if you want to allow only Seeismic registered users to post video comments, or even anonymous people. Overall I think the idea is pretty interesting, if nothing else for the possibilities it opens up. Another takeaway message is: video is coming, and it will be everywhere. Read more

FaceBook Chat Takes It To The Next Level

I logged into my FaceBook account today and noticed FaceBook has added a chat feature! In classic Facebook style, it has a clean & smooth interface and you can basically chat with any FaceBook member that happens to be online at the moment. With this, Facebook takes it to the next level and now it’s also an instant messenger, competing with established services like Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and GTalk. With millions of users, this service will spread like wildfire and I’m sure a desktop FaceBook application is just around the corner. Read more

Open Discussion: What Do You Think of Internet Marketers? (aka the long sales page gurus)

First of all, notice that there are several types of Internet marketers, the questions I raise in this post regard specifically the ones that use long sales pages and several other questionable tactics to sell their products and services. Brian Clark from Copyblogger is certainly an Internet marketer. He recently launched a program called Teaching Sells, where he managed to create an initial buzz around it, had affiliates on board and so on. Yet his tactics were down to earth, and I am pretty sure that no one had anything negative to say about his program. The same cannot be said about people that resort to the long sales pages, though. If you navigate around the web you will notice that there is a great deal of controversy around these practices.

What do I think?

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Are Theme-Based Content Websites Better Than Blogs?

A while back I posted an article titled WordPress Vs SiteBuildIt which resulted in heated arguments on both sides of the fence. Today I got an email from Ken Evoy, which is set to take this argument to a whole new level. Overall, the content of the email says that blogging is a bad idea for small business owners, and what they should really be doing is building static, content-rich websites. Ken’s argument is based on these things:

• A static website, like the ones built by SiteBuildIt, generally have a better logical hierarchy for content, instead of blogs that are “date-based” - (implies that by having a proper hierarchy, it helps your sites get better rankings)

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5 Blogger Books I Would Buy Today

Recently it seems as if there have been a number of bloggers getting deals to publish books. Last week Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett announced the release of their upcoming book. A few weeks ago Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim also published Radically Transparent following the success of his blog. Personally, I like the idea of bloggers that I recognize publishing books. I just ordered Darren and Chris’s book and I’m confident that it will be worth the price, because I’m already familiar with them and I respect and trust their insight and opinions. As I was purchasing the book, it made me think about some other bloggers that I would like to write a book on a particular topic. Plenty of bloggers are selling informational products or giving away free ebooks, but there are a few specifics that I would like to see, and here they are: Read more

Have AdSense Sliding/Scrolling Text Ads Changed Your eCPM?

Just under a week ago AdSense rolled out their new Sliding/Scrolling feature on Text Ads. The response from ProBlogger readers was mixed to say the least and included: “They’re interesting. I like that the arrows are pretty small, yet visible to those who are paying attention to the ads.” Stephanie “What a waste - do they really think that people looking at Adsense will take the time find a couple of tiny arrows to look at more ads?” - Blogthority “I’m not a big fan of bells and whistles, so it annoys me a little bit to see more moving parts on a website. On the other hand, if it offers more-relevant ads and gets more clicking for the bloggers, then I’m all for it!” - Jeff Read more

Are You On A Shared Host?

The whole time of being online with my Freelance Writing blog (which nears one year next month by the way), I have been on a shared hosting account. Little did I know that this could potentially get me into some deep trouble. For starters, did you know that being on a shared host could get your Adsense account banned? Yes, it’s true. A friend of mine shared his hosting account with a spammer and got shut down by Google. No remorse. They simply don’t care. How would you feel if that happened to you? What if the main portion of your income relied on Adsense. This is a heavy pill to swallow and certainly not what I would want to happen to me either. Read more

5 Reasons You Should Not be Blogging

Blogging isn’t for everyone, so why force yourself when you’re just not cut out for it? In fact just for the record, I’ll say that you don’t need to be a blogger to own a blog. You can be a blog owner and get someone else to do all the writing and traffic building, while you focus on other aspects of the business. As an expansion to Monika’s post “5 common beliefs about blogging”, here are some tell-tale signs that blogging simply isn’t your “cup-o-tea”:

1. You absolutely hate writing - There’s no cure for this, and if you really loathe the thought of typing you should not be blogging. True, you can choose other type of media for example create a video blog or focus more on doing podcasts, but you’ll still need to write summaries and perhaps the occasional text post.
2. You rather go out and play - If you don’t like looking at the computer for more than an hour, you can’t really blog. Yes again, you can be outdoor more often if you’re doing a video blog but you still need to edit the video, upload it and blog about it. Generally speaking, a blogger has to spend at least 2-3 hours a day looking at the computer screen.
3. You don’t like to explore / learn - There is a lot of information on the Internet, to the point where there’s usually too much new things happening that you need to read, understand and eventually blog about. If you don’t adapt to well to learning new information, you end up with nothing to say on your blog.
4. You choose the wrong topic - Spinning the same post in different angles can only get you so far. Although you can learn how to come out with creative topic to write about, usually if you find yourself running dry too fast, it has something to do choosing the wrong topic in the first place, a topic that you’re not really passionate about.
5. You’re pretending to be another blogger - If have to develop your own blogging identity and style as soon as possible. You cannot constantly try to mimic what other bloggers are doing and trying to beat them at providing the exact same information, especially if your niche market already has several large, established blog.

If you’re guilt of any of the above, then ask yourself “Should I remove myself from the process of continuously creating new content, and focus instead on marketing and getting more traffic?” Read more

Widgets Take a Big Leap Backwards in WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 did give us some useful improvements, however I feel that the widgets became much harder to use, and I think most people would agree with me. This screen shows the way widgets used to . All you need to do is select the widget and move it across any available sidebars to arrange them, or simple drop it back into the placeholder at the bottom to remove the widget from your blog. Pretty simple to understand, fun to use. But with WordPress 2.5 this becomes a 3-step process which is not only confusing, it’s also much harder and no fun at all. Read more

5 Common Beliefs About Blogging

Blogging has changed the way we look at the Internet, I’m sure of that. Not only do blogs provide extreme leverage for businesses, but they also allow us to earn money from them if we manage to break into this ground. Despite the highs and lows of blogs, many people still harper beliefs that might stop them from getting started in the first place. To make sure you don’t fall prey to these misconceptions, read on.

Blogging is passe

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