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Why I Gave Up Naked Blogging for My Internet Marketing Blog

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But not the kind you're thinking. I'm talking about the kind of blogging or posting to a blog that just sits there naked, waiting to be found, blocks of text without links or related images, under the search radars, no matter how interesting the subject might be. We're talking about taking the proactive approach and making it happen with Zemanta, dressing things up with links and other cool stuff instead of the same old boring crap from me about how great I am or how much I know about social media marketing for small business.

I really had no way of creating any other kind of interest in what I had to say and no way to provide anything else of value or related interest for my readers until Zemanta came along. Well, that's all changed, thanks to Zemanta.

So What is This Zemanta?

Zemanta is a tool that looks over your shoulder while you blog and gives you tips and advice, suggests related content and pictures and makes sure your posts get promoted as they deserve to be.  Zemanta makes blogging a snap, one button publishing at it's finest. They are always coming up with ways to help make blogging easier and for small business owners worried about not having the time to network online with social media, Zemanta will change the way you think about blogging. They are continually engineering better and more creative tools to help you get the most out of your blogging time.

Six Things That Cause Bloggers Headaches – and How Blogging with Zemanta Can Put the Fun Back in Blogging

Blogging made easy, you get to focus on your content while Zemanta spreads the word and helps you to:
Link, Embed, Remix like a Pro, Easily Design the Post, and they care about Copyright issues.
Zemanta will Link You All Over and everyone knows that the key to better page rank is quality inbound links, right?? Well, what better way to get inbound links than to link out to relevant posts and articles related to yours?
Zemanta will help you Engage your audience longer, Link your old posts to keep visitors on site longer and will get you visitors from other sites.
Here is how you can get all the benefits of blogging with Zemanta - FREE and how you set it up on your own blog.
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Posted Saturday, July 24, 2010 in Blog, SEO, Writing Tips
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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Comments!

Images Can Make or Break a Blog

And thanks to folks like Jack Nguyen, a blogger and expert web 2.0 guy, we now know where to find all the free images we need to make our blog posts more interesting, more engaging and just more fun to read. His widely read blog, Online Marketing Blog is one of the more popular blogs in the blog community and we both belong to Blog Engage.

I like what I see when I visit this site mainly because I can add my own photos to their library and get exposure for my photography.
MorgueFile - Another great free image site that wants YOUR photos.
Flickr Creative Commons - The licensing is a bit tricky but necessary.
StockVault -Free for personal and non-commercial use.
EveryStockPhoto – a search engine for free images.

And while it would take a seriously awesome image to get a thousand comments, going viral I think they call it,  one never knows where or when the next image may just do that.

Remember Riley- The Smiling Dog?

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Posted Sunday, May 2, 2010 in Blog, Writing Tips
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The Gift of SEO Knowledge

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Tips and Tricks on How to Rank High in the Search Engines

An SEO Christmas in April? It sure looks that way, what with this wonderful post by my friend Brian who runs the number one blog community on the planet, Blog Engage! It's web 2.0 at it's best, sharing information about one of the hottest topics on the web today, Search Engine Optimization – it's what gets you read if done correctly.

Saint David's Day

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This is a gift from Brian to us all, bringing together in one place the top SEO related tips and secrets from some of the best bloggers in the Blogosphere. And ultimately my gift to new bloggers who visit me here on PW. The more you know about SEO the more successful you will become as a blogger,  especially if your goal is to make money online.

Take it away Brian! Top SEO Articles of all Time

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Posted Sunday, May 2, 2010 in Blog, SEO
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Welcome Visitors to Planet Gearth

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It's a Google World

And as a blogger, I am grateful to Google for providing me with all the tools I need to be a successful one. My definition of success happens to be measured by how much money I can make online. People say write to your audience and the rest will come, blah! I say write for Google, wait for the Index Fairy to sprinkle some Google Dust on my blogs, give me good PR (and yes, I do care about PR) and my future as a blogger is secure!

Top Ten Things Google Does for an Aspiring Blogger

What does Google do for a blogger, let me count the ways!:
1. First and foremost you go and get yourself a free Google account and start off with Gmail. Google is not just the number one search engine, no!, the whole world is a better place because of them. They brought us Gmail, email with no more spam, no more Nigerian letters, no more phishermen in your favorite blogspot!

2. And with Gmail comes a cool Calendar, Google Documents, etc. Why, you could run a corporation on the free tools they give you! And for just a few bucks a year you can change the world with Google Apps!

3. Google was a green company before green became a color, well almost. I know they make a lot of green for themselves but they sure know about the true meaning of web 2.0, (information sharing) and there is a rumor that Matt Cutts has green eyes too.

4. It's empowering to create a blog with Google Blogger, your own personal website with free, unlimited hosting, beautiful templates and other cool stuff, not to mention it's the easiest blog application to use that there is. If you think it takes too much time to blog, think again!

5. You can dress up your blog's posts with Google Images and YouTube videos that are relevant to your blog's theme and topics. (BTW for you new guys, Google owns YouTube)
4. Connect your blog with your Twitter account automatically. Instead of copying and pasting code into your blog to see your most recent tweets, just click a button in Twitter's Goodies tab.
6. Use Google's Adwords, Keywords tool to determine what people are searching for so you can target your writing topics to those searches.

7. Use Google Adsense to monetize your blog. Adsense for Content, Adsense for Search, Adsense for Feeds, Adsense for Domains, WOW! Watch those Googlebucks ad up!

8. Take advantage of Google Analytics to measure your blog's performance. Tweak this, change that, next thing you know you have become the next rising star in the Blogosphere!

9. Create a Google profile for the rest of the world to see that you are a blogger of some repute!

99.9% of Google's Tools are free for the taking!

Who else can do that, WordPress? Nope, Tumblr, again no, Typepad, nyet, not that there is anything wrong with any of those blogger platforms, I LOVE WordPress for example but Google is my choice for what I call Turnkey Blogging. Google does it all for me, and I would be willing to say that if man blew it up and we had to start over again, Google would have all the resources to re-create our planet – the right way.

Oh, I almost forgot! Number 10 in our list of The 10 Top Things Google Can Do for a New Blogger?

Google creates a legacy for the common man. Think about it.

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Posted Saturday, May 1, 2010 in Blog, Google
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Mining the Thesaurus for Online Gold

How to Buy a Domain Name
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Thesaurus as a Writing Tool for Bloggers

There have been many occasions when I have consulted a Thesaurus:

When I am online and creating a post for one of my many blogs and I need a word or phrase that means the same as one I have previously used,  maybe just to keep me from repeating myself, or using new words to travel a different route to emphasize the same point. It's handy to have Thesaurus in your favorites or bookmarked so that when you are doing the actual writing you can consult it quickly.

So how do I use it to mine online gold, you ask?

I have a dog-eared copy of a paperback Thesaurus for domain name searches. You can come up with some killer names that mean the same as some very popular domain names that are not available for you to register. Reason I use a hard copy is because you can thumb through pages, instead of doing a search for one word at a time. Maybe they aren't what we call "natural hit" domains but they can make you some money with a good one if it describes your niche, especially a short one!

If you peruse a Thesaurus long enough you start to get ideas for blog posts too, many times I have taken it to bed with a highlighter!  If you are experiencing a lull in your writing you might want to thumb (oops there's "thumb" again, let's see what alternatives the Thesaurus can offer me that make sense for this post.)

Ah, there we are, had I been able to scroll down further when I took this screenshot and still shown the word "thumb" you would have been able to see another list of verb suggestions for thumb, meaning in this case, to thumb through a book. The word I chose was "explore" so then my sentence might look like this: If you experiencing a lull in your writing you might want to "explore" the Thesaurus for post ideas.

With ideas come inspiration, with inspiration comes writing, and with writing comes online gold in the form of traffic, backlinks and advertisers!

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Posted Saturday, May 1, 2010 in Blog, Writing Tips
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The Ten Commandments of Social Media

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1. Thou Shalt Create a Blog (preferably with Google Blogger)

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Facebook, Inc.
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2. Thou Shalt Post Often (on topics relevant to your niche)

3. Thou Shalt Create Profiles (Google, Lifestream, everywhere)

4. Thou Shalt Comment (on many blogs)

5. Thou Shalt Join a Blog Community (and support it's members)

6. Thou Shalt Podcast Often (try Screenr, web based video recording – it's free and easy to use)

7. Thou Shalt Upload Videos & Photos (to make your posts more interesting)

8. Thou Shalt Create Social Media Accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc)

9. Thou Shalt Spend One Hour a Week on Social Media Activities (tweets, updates, explore Hootsuite)

10. Thou Shalt Get Connected (with as many people as you can find)

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Posted Monday, April 5, 2010 in Blog, Social Media
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Is Having Adsense on Your Blog Worth It?

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Should you or shouldn't you – feature Google's Adsense on your new blog? Turns out, that is a very good question, with two parts! Do you need it on your blog to make money? And if you think so how will you manage it?

Worth it? Depends on how you look at it. Thanks to awesome bloggers like my friend Sarge over at Beginner Blogger we have a great source of open dialog about this topic (and a lot of others), someone to bounce our ideas off of as well as swap opinions about topics such as Google's Adsense program, and tons of others. We don't always agree and thats what makes it so interesting.

Good, bad, or indifferent, opinions matter. Because after reading a post that interests you, sometimes the comments that follow will answer questions that the article may not have included. Bloggers are the first to admit that they don't know everything! The comments other bloggers leave can even change your mind about something. Or it could even stimulate even further dialog or another post even.

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Posted Tuesday, February 9, 2010 in Blog, Monetization
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