My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin.  I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from.  The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width.  The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical.  Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.

I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know.  The contest will begin August 1st.

The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger.

John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals.

Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network.  What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions.

Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an interview with Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam Network

Earlier in the week I posted that PepperJam Network was giving all new publishers who signed up with their network a signup bonus of $10. Today I’ve managed to get a quick interview with Pepperjam Network’s CEO and President Kristopher B. Jones to ask him about the network, why he started it and what tips he could give us as publishers for using it in a way that earns us the most money.

John Chow has been pushing NeverBlue Ads pretty hard of late. I am also interested and owe them a return phone call. It seems these days even the bigger blogs are abandoning google so fast we can smell smoke. Possibly it is the guys at google taking the torch to ever more bloggers. It is hard to say for sure.

Earlier in the week John also wrote on TinyMasive.com

What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.

There are many other networks available. Some of them are sketchy. Some of them just hard to get into. Some of them only in beta, like Yahoo. They are out there though and for those who are frustrated with Google, fear not there are options.

‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
“Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content
that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their
own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they
cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.”

That might sound ominous and horrible, just like everything that the Bush administration has done for the last seven years, and in a way it is all of that.  On the other hand that is the nature of doing business.  Suffice it to say blogging is a business or at least you should be thinking of it as such if you ever plan to make money.

These companies be they MySpace, Yahoo, Google or even your own hosting company all have an image to maintain.  If you associate yourselves with them and threaten that image they have every right and not to mention a responsibility to their stock holders to maintain that image even if it means pissing off a paying subscriber.  That is called risk management, the world revolves around it.  Yes, sometimes it seems unfair, but life isn’t fair.  If you think life should be fair take your candy ass somewhere else because I can almost bet I won’t like you or really care what you have to say.

Do you see how that works or get the subtle of what I have just told you?  This space is mine and there is very little you can do to stop me from saying what I want.  if this was MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal I could could still get away with telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’, however there are plenty of places I couldn’t and keep my account very long.  Just as i could get away with saying what I would like to do to Cat Deeley or Kourtni Lind on those same places, I couldn’t tell you the same thing about the teenage girl who lives across the street.  Not that she interests me in the least, I could tell you what I would like to do to her on my my own blog if I had such an interest.  While I don’t have an unlimited ability to say those things because of the agreement I have with my hosting company, it certainly lets me go a lot farther than any community blog will.

Now if I wanted to write twisted perverse stories about the girl, i am pretty sure I couldn’t get away with that very long with Host Gator, especially if I used any sort of details.  More precisely, I could until someone told on me and my account just disappeared.  I am not willing to run that risk, even if I do get daily backups of all my databases and have every post stored locally for all of my blogs.  I like the price I pay for hosting and get good service, so my risk management assessment says no to cute blond mid teenage girl meets thirty something blogboy who turns out to be the sperm donor that gave her life porn stories.  There are hosting companies that would let me host that and wouldn’t even bat an eye because it is tame compared to some of what people post.  Those companies have made risk assessments too, and charge you accordingly.

When it comes right down to it if you are a blogger and want to say what ever the hell you want, there are some rules you need to pay attention to.  First unless your speech and ideas are very tame, you risk losing an account almost anywhere you go.  If you want to say what is on your mind pretty much unfettered then you need to get yourself a domain account with a good hosting company, click the Host Gator ad to your right for a really good deal.  Lastly if you are going to publish what amounts to porn, get a hosting company that specializes in and allows it.

Before you say you shouldn’t have to put up with a company interfering with your right to say what ever you want while using there service it is time to ask yourself if you want to be called a hypocrite.  If you blog and use any sort of spam filter or moderate comments you are censoring another person’s speech.  Know the game, know the rules and know that you will always be playing by someone else’s rules…

Thanks

brad

- Out of My Mouth - http://www.outofmymouth.com -

Copyright © 2008 Out of My Mouth. All rights reserved.
This post is protected property of OutofMyMouth.com and the copyright holder. It may not be copied, syndicated, or used without including the Author Information and this disclaimer. OutofMyMouth.com is a member of The Hart Blog Network

When you are first deciding on online marketing in order to promote your business online, the main online marketing methods that you will encounter are Organic search engine optimisation and Pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords.

Organic search engine optimisation and Pay pr click advertising are the two main methods of online marketing.  Both these forms of online marketing are aimed at getting highly targeted visitors to your website by making your website rank on search engine results for the keywords that you are targeting.

Ideally a business needs to utilise both, organic Search engine optimisation as well as Pay per click advertising on order to get the maximum exposure for their business online. However cost and budget considerations often result in a business having to make a choice between using organic search engine optimisation or Pay per click advertising for their business.

Before discussing which form of online marketing is better for your business, it is important to understand the difference between organic search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. Organic search engine optimisation refers to the search results that appear in the main centre section of the search results. Ranking within organic search engine results cannot be bought and ranking is a result of organic non-biased steps taken over a period of time.  It is dependent on the overall popularity of your website on the internet in general among other on site factors. Organic listings are the results that appear in the main section of a search engine such as Google when we search for something. Pay per click advertising on the other hand refers to the paid listing or sponsored results that appear on the right of the search results page and not in main middle section of the page.

Pay per click result is paid for and results are almost immediate to achieve. However there are many drawbacks to pay per click advertising as compared with Organic search engine optimisation. The recent years have seen an exponential rise in competition and a steep rise in pay per click costs. Click fraud is another rising concern in pay per click advertising where an advertiser may be charged for clicks that are not by genuine customers.

1)      Many surveys and search engine marketing studies have pointed than users are more likely to click on organic search results that appear on the main section of the page rather than the paid listings that appear as ads on the right.

Author: Alfonso Muñoz

Every blogger knows that we are nothing without our readers so it is very important to get new readers everyday but it is equal or more important to grip the ones who come to our blog once in a while. What can we do? Here are some tips that will help you to achieve it:

1. Shorter = better. This is almost a rule and I break it sometimes in spite of knowing that it is quite important to write short and concise posts. It happens to me that when I find and interesting but excessively long post usually I get bored of reading and I give up without reading the whole text. I talked about it with my friend Cheeky Chubby (you must have a blog, you missed a link ) he reminded me that sometimes I write too long posts and I know it my friend, but sometimes I write and write and write…
2. You must use lists, like I’m doing now. Readers like list, they love to have the information organized and easy to read.
3. Try to write on one idea per post. Don’t mix two or three different topics in the same post. If you have several things in your mind it is better to write a different post for each one and programme them to different hours instead of publish in a row.
4. Explain things as clear and simple as possible. You must realize that most of your readers aren’t experts with computers or high skilled in the use of Internet.
5. Use the Time Stamp feature. Yeah, this is one of the best tools that WordPress has. If you write 3 or 4 posts in a row you can publish them all along the day, every couple of hours for example. This way your readers will return to your blog more than once per day to see if something new is there.
6. Speak to your readers with closeness. You don’t know who are most of them but remember that they know who you are and they like to hear about you and your blog. So try to be close to them in your writing style, avoid to be distant. This is something like “be yourself”.
7. Try to write without grammar and spelling mistakes… well, perhaps I’m not the best one to talk about this . Yes, this is important. A text full of this kind of mistakes seems to be written by a little boy and it affects to your credibility as a serious blogger.
8. Be optimist. People like to read good and successful stories. It encourages them to follow your steps and follow you closer. Don’t tell them how bad your day is because all of us have enough with our own troubles. Give them an optimistic point of view, brighten them up

Put in practice this advices, I assure you that you’ll get positive results.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/8-blogging-tips-to-grip-your-readers-444686.html

About the Author:

Alfonso Muñoz is a blogger keen on SEO, Marketing and Blogging, who learns, experiments and shares all the knowledge gathered during his trip around Internet. You can find him in Binary Ant

Know Your Digg Goals
If your goal is to make the front page, good luck.  More than 50% of the front page is controlled by less 100 people.  You need to think smaller from the start and work towards the homepage.  Start by thinking about how to get X number of Diggs.  Set realistic goals and analyze the results.

Write Digg Descriptions.
Everyone says content is king and that is mostly true.  Writing Digg worthy descriptions is very different from just writing good content.  People other than your Digg friends have to want to vote for your entry.  Make those 350 character work for you.

Make Digg Friends
Without some popular friends on Digg, you simply won’t make it very far.  It isn’t simply good enough to shout out a Digg entry because a lot of those get ignored, especially during the busy part of the day.  If you have popular Digg friends you can IM asking them to digg you goes a lot further.  People look at what other popular people are digging and often times Digg just to be part of the crowd.

Comment on other People’s Diggs
You want to be recognized and people want to to be noticed for their own efforts.  The best way to do both is comment on Diggs.  The more you comment without being an asshole the more friends you will gain and the more people who will reciprocate your efforts.

Be Patient
Keep working Diggs for several days if you are getting traction.  Some Diggs will simply take time to get going.  Other Diggs will go nowhere and you should move on, but even then check back occasionally for new comments.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog.  After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of.  They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails.  Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed.  I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day.  Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board.  I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed.  Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely.  First I wasn’t given an answer.  The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing.  The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain.  They have blamed it on the number of tags.  They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having.  Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either.  If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks.  One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year.  I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out.  I know some of you are asking what the big deal is.  First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic.  If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising.  Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for.  I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim.  The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked.  They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it.  Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another.  Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility.  I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

1) Cry to support for a fix.

2) Download your wp-congig.php manually change the password

To your new one then upload it overwriting the old file.

Have fun and enjoy the rest of your Memorial Day