It never occurred to me to have an artist’s blog before I read
Kristen Royce’s article on “Why Every Artist Should Have A
Blog”.

One of the great things about having an art blog is that you
can update it right away. It can often take days or weeks to
update an art web site. You can also edit a post and correct
it immediately. And it is also possible to go back and edit or
“tweak” a post after you have published it on your artist’s
blog any time you want to.

You can do very different things with an art blog than you can
with an art website. They are a great combination.

An artist’s web site is like a constant one-person show. An
artist’s blog has a very different tone than an artist’s web
site. An artist’s blog is like having an ongoing chatty art
conversation.

The subject matter can be much more personal in an art
blog. You can talk about events and information that just
would not fit in with an artist’s website.

I am in the early learning stages of art blogging and I am
finding that art blogging can be a whole lot of fun.

© Mary Baker 2005

Mary Baker is a contemporary realist painter, whose studio
is in Newburyport, Massachusetts. This New England city,
north of Boston, has been the inspiration for the artist’s
realistic oil paintings. Mary Baker is a professional artist and
has shown in New York art galleries.

You can visit Mary at her website, Mary Baker Art at http://www.marybakera
rt.com, see her beautiful paintings and read her articles
on a variety of subjects including a four part series on Art,
Artists and the Web. A list of articles can be found on her
Site Map and Mary’s paintings can be seen on every page of
Mary Baker Art.

You can also visit Mary Baker’s artists blog, Mary Baker
Art-Blog to find art information for artists and people
who are in the art world.

This is how I started in buying land for my nurseries. When I
was twelve years old, I had bought and sold many shares of stock
on the NYSE. I was a motor mouth even then. I always was eager
to talk to anyone who liked to invest and discuss stock picks.
One of my fathers friends John was such a person. John only had
a 3rd grade education. His mother was a prostitute and his first
job was collecting and selling leaches to whores in Trenton to
be used to remove hickies on their…Well, you got the picture?

John could hardly speak, he studderd so bad that it was a labor
to talk to him. But John was no dummy. He had gone on to become
a noted designer of transformers and had built up a large
company. He lived on a large estate that overlooked a huge pond
which to a twelve year old was an eye opener. What ever John
would say or do had to be noteworthy.

John would also talk of the lastest electronic gadgets, hottest
stock picks, Trees, hunting stories, and about real estate. Just
what I was interest in. One day John came to our house. He was
so excited that he could hardly talk to us. He handed me a book
and said,” Re…re…re..re…re…read this. “It was a book on
stock options. The book detailed about puts and calls and how
powerful they are in investing. At the time there were few
options offered. I read this book. I reread this book over and
over. I was amazed at how powerful an option could be. I did not
buy or sell any as I did not have the funds to risk on them but
I said to myself , “This is something that I am going to do some
day.”

Most options on stocks or commodities expire as worthless. Some
estimates are that 80% expire as worthless. Not a very good
track record for an investor. Now for every option buyer there
is a seller. Someone is making money, not just the brokers.
Option buyers aquire what can be called leverage. An occasional
winner can make up for a bunch of losers. The option sellers
don’t necessarly lose unless they trade options naked, ( they
don’t own the underlining security) they just don’t have
potential gains that they would have had.

Options clearly define an investors loss liabilities. When you
buy an option it defines the price of the asset, the time you
have to excerise the option, and the capital that you risk. If
the value of theoption cotract goes down the most you lose is
your inital investment.

There are two basic options, a put and a call. A call allows the
buyer of the option to buy the asset a established price for an
established peroid of time. A put allows the buyer to force the
right to force the seller to buy the asset at and establihed
price for an established peroid of time.

What I decided to do when I purchased real estate is to acquire
real estate options for farms which had long term contracts. I
sought contacts that went out 5-10 years. If I could put
together a contract that would run long enough, the rising real
estate market would make the contract price a bargain price in
afew years. I would offer yearly option renewal payments to the
sellers. I made those payments applicable to the purchase price
so as time flies the property becomes cheaper.

Now I know that your thinking that this can’t work. I know it
does for I have done many of these contracts. Most people who
have sold me these contracts want just what this contract
offers. They can remain on their property and have the option
payment which suppliments their income. They just don’t own any
appreciation in the property which they would not have if they
sold it. There are also great tax reasons for selling an option.
When an option is written it is considered an opening
transaction. Taxes are assesed on completed transactions. If a
option is not closed revenue is generally not taxed. (see your
investment advisor and make sure the contract is properly
formed.)

Once this contract is in place one could lease the fields from
the owners. This could be known as a lease purchase contract.
Now you have ground on which you can plant trees. In many
instances I have aquired land this way for less than the cost of
the taxes on a yearly cash flow basis.

You can see Bill’s web sit at http://www.seedlingsrus.com

The 21st century can well be called century of knowledge and
information. We are presented with the tons of knowledge every
day, by the virtue of internet technology.

Every one can share the knowledge he/she has got through the
experience in his life. This knowledge can be beneficial for the
other’s.

The best way to share knowledge on internet are the blogger
sites, we every one could post the knowledge he has about the
particular category.

The most important and famous categories are IT related stuff,
since IT professionals deal more with the internet then the
people in any other field.

I have visited many sites, during my 6 years IT field
experience, and have found one really good site for IT Geeks, as
its name suggests for IT professionals to share the knowledge
they have got, http://www.myitblog.com

Many people begin to blog without any idea as to what they want to talk about and that’s alright. What is it that they say about spontaneity being the spice of life. Or was that variety? Eh, one of those.

Anyway, when that first rush of creativity wears off, bloggers often find themselves abandoned by their muse on a dry but surprisingly crowded island called Writer’s Blocktopia. Here are a few ways to flag down the rescue ship of inspiration:

1. Read what you have written so far and try coming at your subject from a different angle. This is what professionals do. They take a well flogged idea and try to create a new whip to beat it with. So if you’ve been blogging about how much your kids drive you nuts, turn it around and blog about how much you drive your kids nuts (because you do).
2. Join a social bookmarking site such as Digg or Fark. These types of sites dig up stories of interest and provide almost a limitless supply of things to blog about.
3. Take part in a forum and blog about the issues raised there. The trick here is to join an active forum with lots of diversity. You are sure to find something to spark your muse among all of the colorful opinions flying around.
4. Diversify: What are your other interests? If you’ve been blogging about your children, try expanding to other subjects such as the family dog or your American Idol obsession.
5. Don’t know much or don’t have many interests? Choose a topic you would like to learn more about. With so much information available on the internet it is extremely easy to begin research in an area you are unfamiliar with. Places like Wikipedia offer a wonderful jumping off point for a new learning adventure.
6. Visit meme and quiz directories. Places like Blog Things and Blog Quiz have quizzes that offer fun, fortune cookie style insights into your personality. Manic Monday Meme and The Meme Directory offer writing prompts to jumpstart your creativity.
7. Blog surf. Find out what others are talking about and blog your opinion of the subject.
8. Ask for inspiration. Let your readers help you by asking for suggestions or questions. This is a great way to interact with your readership.

And if you just can’t get your muse to work with you, perhaps it is time for a break. Take a few days off from blogging and refresh yourself. I guarantee you’ll be back to whipping out witty repartee in no time.

Happy Blogging

Indigo Black is a freelance writer with an innumerable number of interests that include: writing, blogging, erotica, mythology, philosophy and web design. Currently, she operates two resource sites, one for erotica authors and one for bloggers.

Cyber Abuse : Blog and Ping Part 1
By Trina L.C.
Schiller

Too much of a good thing can be bad. We have always
known this, but this knowledge has not stopped us from over
indulgence. I think that rather than variety being touted as the
spice of life, perhaps we should consider moderation.

In recent years, the news media has warned us all about the over
use of antibiotics. The warnings tell us that the bugs they
[drugs] were designed to kill have been mutating into what are
now called Super Bugs, as the result of developing an immunity
to the drugs.

The misuse/ over use of these drugs has
made them ineffective in fighting disease. The drug companies
don’t care, because a) they’ve made billions of dollars
selling these drugs, and b) they will make billions more
on the drugs they plan to develop to fight the Super Bugs. It is
a win-win situation for them.

What does this have to
do with marketing? Quite a bit, actually.

For years,
webmasters would have to wait anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months
to have a web site indexed by Google, Yahoo, or MSN, unless they
wanted to pay the big bucks to get spidered right away. The
submission process, when done manually, was a very lengthy,
tedious chore. So, we created auto submitters to do the work for
us. However, it still took forever, in cyber-speak, to get
listed.

Then came new systems to get ranked higher with
the search engines. The age of SEO was born, and webmasters got
to optimizing their sites to get higher rankings, but still the
wait for indexing remained slow.

Then came
blogging.

It took awhile to catch on, but once
everyone discovered that a blog was more attractive to the
spider bots, they began popping up everywhere.

Why
are blogs more quickly crawled and indexed by search
engines? Because of pinging. Blogs, RSS feeds in
particular, have the capability to announce themselves to the
search engines. In essence, a blog ping tells the search
engines, “Hey! Look at me! I have something new to show you!”
Static web sites can’t do that and have to wait for their turn
during the next crawl.

In the beginning, this was an
awesome thing. If you were technically gifted, and could handle
the scripting, you could install a blog on your site and
ping blog directories like weblogs.com, every time you
updated your content. The alternative was to set up your blog
through a third party, and let them handle the technical stuff
for you, or you could visit ping services like ping-o-matic, and
manually ping the servers yourself.

It didn’t
take the gurus long to find software developers who could create
a short cut to all of this and the blog and ping
controversy was born. Software to auto submit your blog
to the search engines. Along with the blog and ping
software, they also created programs that would allow anyone to
virtually steal content from other sites and place it on the
blog owners’ sites, programs to auto submit comments to
legitimate blogs, and of course programs that generate spam blogs, which are nothing but pages of
keywords, used to grab search engine attention away from the
legitimate informational blogs, while allowing the
blogger the opportunity to cash in on Google Adsense and other
pay-per-click programs.

If you take a look at weblogs.com
you will find more and more blog listings that resemble:
http://blah.blah.blah.com FREE INFO. Click through to those
blogs and you’ll find pages full of CRAP!

Weblogs.com
averages about 2 million pings per day. That is a lot of pings,
and that number continues to grow. The demand on their server
was so masive, that they were not able to keep up with the
influx. That challenge has apparently been met with a solution.
VeriSign has recently purchased weblogs.com from Scripting News
Inc. for a tidy sum of $2.3 million in CASH! This means that
weblogs.com will now have greater resources with which to
provide a more stable and reliable communications
infrastructure.

Why am I going on about weblogs.com?
Because Google uses weblogs.com for it’s listings.

Freely submitted data is easily abused. Like FFA sites, ping
sites will lose their advantage as a result of all this
spamming. Companies like Google are not interested in
filtering spam from content, and will eventually ignore the
pings and things, rendering them useless. Very much like
the antibiotics vs the Super Bugs.

So what happens when
something becomes ineffective? It dies. Google has already begun
to fight back against blog spam of other flavors. It will
just be a matter of time before they ban blogs all
together.

All the money spent on blogging and pinging
will have been for nothing, because it will no longer work. The
program pushers don’t care, because they’ve made buckets of
money, and they’ve already been working on their next new tool
to soak John Q for.

Just take a look at the FFA and safe
list businesses. How effective are they now? Freely submitted
data abused to the point of no return.

Copyright © 2005
The Trii-Zine Ezine

www.ezines1.com

Trina
L.C. Schiller : About the Author http://www.trinaschiller.ws

Keywords: blog, ping, blog spam, weblogs

If you are not blogging for your business then you should be. While many people simply dismiss blogging because of its description as a web diary they are missing a lot of traffic and revenue generating opportunities every day. Are you one of those missing out?

In truth blogs are much more than a simple web diary. They are actually a content management system and/or an easy web site template. Blogging software allows you to begin posting your content to the Internet in minutes and when you harness that ability with an RSS feed you have a powerful traffic magnet.

I have come up with 7 reasons why every business should have a blog and RSS feed.

1. Publishing a regularly updated blog helps you keep in touch with your existing audience and/or customer base. You can publish updates, news, or thoughts in your blog as well as answer questions.

2. A blog can help you attract new customers. Your blog entries (posts or articles) will become fodder for the search engines and will attract new visitors. If your blog answers the visitors question or attracts their interest you have just found another qualified lead.

3. Blogs and RSS feeds often rank higher in search engines than traditional web sites. Search engines love blogs and RSS feeds. If you design your blog properly then every time you update it the search engines are notified. Even if you don’t regularly ping most search engines will revisit blogs more frequently. Plus the very organization of a blog lends itself to spidering and good search engine ranking.

4. Blogs can help you establish or build your reputation in a particular field. As your blog grows you will demonstrate your knowledge in your chosen niche.

5. Blogs and RSS feeds are good revenue streams. You can add pay-per-click ads, affiliate ads, or sell ad space on your blogs. In fact, many PPC companies also provide the ability to add PPC to your RSS feeds.

6. Blogs are great ways to generate leads. Even if you don’t want to put any advertising on your blog you can use it to promote or capture leads for your own programs. These are great leads as the fact that they came from your blog means they are already interested in your topic and predisposed to your individual message.

7. Creating your own blog is the easiest way to establish a presence on the Internet and creating an RSS feed is even easier. In fact, it is also the cheapest way to get started on the Internet as there are a number of free blogging sites out there. I started out with http://blogger.com and usually recommend them but have heard others point to several other top blogging sites as well. The blogging software that I now use is WordPress and also happens to be free. In fact, most web hosts now offer WordPress (or other free blogging software) as a free site add-on through Fantastico. Installing WordPress from scratch is quick and easy but Fantastico makes it even easier. Blogs created at Blogger have an RSS feed created for them and WordPress also creates feeds in several variations automatically.

As you can see there are several benefits to starting your own blog and RSS feed. If you can count that many benefits from an Internet marketing technique that is also free and easy then you are foolish not to begin using it for yourself.

Deanna Mascle publishes the Establish Your Epresence newsletter which offers helpful tips and advice about internet marketing. Learn more at Epresence

Blogs are introduced into the internet for a few years now. But most people are not sure what is a blog exactly.

A blog is like an online diary of a person. Blogs can be used to put opinion, thought, sales messages, promotions, product announcement,tips. Anything you can think of can be written in a blog. Even pictures, audio and video.

Google owns the most popular blog company http://www.blogger.com
Also google owns a search features, specially for receiving searches from blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com
A properly structured blog can do wonders for your marketing effort. Since people are able to reply to your blog messages, thus you can create discussion online with your target market.
Thus you can soft sell your products more easily due to the trust factor blog creates.

A mistake made by some marketers is that they do not make their blog properly. A poorly written blog deliver the wrong message.

Search Engine Optimisation For Blogs

A major advantage of using blogs is that search engine loves blogs more to index than a website.
This is because there are many blogs which are updated regularly.
Here are some tips for search engine optimisation for blogs:

Simple Content

Most marketers believe that you can optimize your blog for search engines be keeping the content simple. You can choose one quality content topic for your blog and make it your base.

Put Up More

The more content you put in your blog, the more search engine friendly it is.

Submit Your Blog To Search Engines

If you submit your blog to search engines, although it can take a while, but if they list your site, you will see a large increase in traffic.

Use Keywords For Search Engines

Identify the most popular keyword, and adjust them with your blog template.

This is how it can be done for blogger.com:-
Log in to your blogger account. Go to the template and identify the <$BlogMetaData$> tab.

Above this add the following:

for meta tag for keywords use “A,B,C,D”.

For meta tag for description , use “X,Y,Z”.

Replace A,B,C,D with your choice of keywords.

Replace X,Y,Z with your description.

Also make the <$blogpagetitle$> tag relevant to the title of your topic.
Then save the template changes.

Daily Updates

For best optimisation, you should update it daily at the least.
The more often you update it, the more search engines will list your blog.
Blogger from Google can create inbuilt RSS feeds for your posts for upgraded version of blogger).

How to get your blog noticed quickly?

After creation of your blog, submit it to

1) http://www.pingoat.com

2) http://www.blogexplosion.com

3) http://rssfeeddirectory.com/blog_lists.html

4) http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Get the RSS feeds of your blog and submit it to RSS feed submission directories.
Post remarks to other blogs those match the theme of your blog and add the blog Url in your signature.
Use addme.com to post your blog to top 14 search engines.
There are over 3 million blogs online. However only a tiny percentage is used to increase sales traffic.

Shouvik Mazumder is an active internet marketer for some time and has been busy keeping testing different marketing procedures.
SFI Affiliate Program

Now here is something to ponder, perhaps if you are feeling bored with Christmas TV or the endless magazine puzzles we seem to get at this time of year.

Everyone knows that finding good information on the internet is like finding a needle in a haystack, right? In fact, it’s worse than that because when you find a needle at least you know it’s a needle, as opposed to something masquerading as a needle; you don’t have to go looking for objective proof that it’s a needle.

So why do so many “edubloggers” think that the concept of blogrolls, which are lists of blogs that subscribers to a blog subscribe to, and similar devices (such as, in effect, shared favorites) are so wonderful?
(Incidentally, an edublogger is someone who blogs about education. The “world” of educational blogging is usually referred to as the “edublogosphere” – as opposed to the blogosphere, which is what the rest of the blogging world inhabits. Come on, please keep up at the back!)

I can see the (superficial) attraction of having many more potential sources of information, but if finding good information is like finding a needle in a haystack, what is the point of increasing the size of the haystack?

Terry Freedman is an independent educational technology consultant. For daily articles and a free newsletter, visit his website at http://www.ictineducation.org

So everybody’s bloggin’, but what makes one web marketer’s blog a hotbed of marketer activity and massive sale converter… while another blog just sits there collecting hits but getting no real business? Check the Five Bloggin’ Bloopers that will kill your credibility and drive business right into the other guy’s lap… then avoid them like the plague!

Blog Blooper 1. Not branding yourself.

How will people who land on your blog via the links and search engine results know who you are unless you tell them? Try to close every blog entry you write with a signoff or call-to-action. Example: “Need a copywriter? Email dina@wordfeeder.com.” This way, no matter what your fans are reading, they’ll be reminded of you, your website and what you can offer them.

Blog Blooper 2. Sharing too much personal information.

If you’re blogging for business, stick to business. Sure, it’s okay to reveal a few amusing details now and then… but if you gab too much on your blog, all you’ll succeed in doing is attract other gabbers. Remember your purpose in all this, and keep your topics closely geared fulfilling the business needs of your target audience.

Blog Blooper 3. Too many links to competitor sites.

Your fans will love you for sharing resources, and if you link to “friendly neighborhood service providers like yourself”, this will endear those marketers to you and your blog and prompt reciprocal links back. However, be sure to choose your outbound links wisely. Select complimentary service providers… not ones who offer exactly what you do!

Blog Blooper 4. Not enough “spice.”

Post an intriguing or controversial viewpoint, and your readers are more likely to jump into the conversation with posted comments. The more activity on your blog, the more people are “following along” as the plot develops, and the more repeat visitors you’ll get. If everyone’s flocking to your blog, that means better page rank for you. So please do “spice it up!”

Blog Blooper 5. All “pickup articles,” no personality.

Hey, now there’s a great way to develop your web style - only post other people’s tips, stories and advice. Nothing like drawing a crowd and then sending them away to other folks’ website because you never took the time to reveal your opinions, advice, or even your line of business for that matter! Sure, search engines feed on article content, but you MUST develop your blog persona or you will NEVER get business!

Okay, now that we’ve laid down the blogging laws, it’s time for you to hit the blogosphere and make a name for yourself. Start from scratch and have fun with it. I know you can blog like a web marketing pro.

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Are YOU Content With Your Content? Get Top Secret Marketing Tips from the Web’s Biggest Gurus and Expert Authors on The First Annual Web Content Awareness Day on FEBRUARY 9, 2006.

Dina Giolitto is a copywriting consultant and ghostwriter with 10 years of experience writing corporate print materials and web content. Trust her with your next e-book, article series or web project, and make a lasting impression on your audience of information-hungry prospects. Visit http://www.wordfeeder.com for more details.

Because I’m a journalist and copywriter who also reads and writes blogs, people who don’t use the Internet as much as I do have started to ask me some searching questions of late. Some of them sound worried.

They have heard a lot about blogging and the impact it could have on traditional marketing.

One person even asked me (perhaps a little concerned) if PR teams will be replaced with bloggers. I don’t see it, I reassured them.

PR is also about managing people and that will always be important. The mainstream media isn’t about to disappear, and the majority of the population probably couldn’t care less about blogs. For all the hype, blogging should be seen as a potential addition to a marketing portfolio.

The place blogging may have its biggest impact is on areas of the trade press.
There is a revolution in publishing taking place, sparked by the new forms of advertising such as Google ad sense. This has made it possible for someone running a blog site, with a staff of one and overheads of almost nothing, to start earning a living from their publishing.

If the blogger can get readers, then Google places the ads (relevant to the content) – and you have a publishing business. This gives a lot of people an incentive to provide great content – so that they get more readers, and more money from ads.

It’s just like the traditional press, but without the need for offices, advertising sales teams, HR departments etc.

This works best in niche areas. Soon, there may not be much need for magazines about new gadgets, or mobile phones, or ride-on-lawn mowers or whatever. Because the blogs have it covered, providing more up-to-date information and readers who are ready to buy – and can simply click on the advert.

The everyday bloggers have a new-found power and are not about to go away. Some blogs now get millions, even tens of millions of readers a day. They are rivalling the mainstream media – and if the US government can’t control them, what chance does a small company or even a big enterprise have?

Companies and blogs

It’s still pretty early days for companies using blogs, and the whole thing is evolving. It will probably settle down into one more piece in the jigsaw, another communication channel that companies can use.

The style used in company blogs needs to be less “written by committee” and more personal and spontaneous.

Companies that try to use too much subterfuge in the blogging world are exposing themselves to a potential backlash. There’s a great emphasis on honesty in the blogging world – for example bloggers will often end a post with a “disclosure” note which mentions any conflict of interest.

At a simple level, blogging can be seen as simply another way of publishing information on the Internet. It’s useful because it is so fast and it’s easy to get a range of people involved quite quickly.

However, there are real skills involved to good blogging. Not only does the writing have to be engaging, colourful, funny, informative etc, but the writer also needs to take account of search engine optimisation techniques – which basically means using the right keywords to ensure the blog shows up in the search engines.

At it’s most sophisticated, blogging is being used to create “viral marketing” campaigns – to create a “buzz” around a product as though this were coming from ordinary people. This is a whole new field of marketing / advertising…

UK copywriter and journalist Simon Townley has written advertising and marketing copy for hundreds of companies, including some of the biggest names in modern business. He can be contacted through www.simontownley.co.uk/contact.htm. You can read and download more articles by Simon Townley, and which are free to webmasters, at: www.simontownley.co.uk. You are welcome to re-use this article on your website providing you don’t change it, you include my byline and you provide a live link to my website.