So, let’s say you have a blog that publishes more than blog posts. Or rather, you use WordPress’s blog posts loop to publish glossaries, directories, or other lists that you don’t necessarily want published in your rss feed or exposed in your archives. Well, there’s a two-prong solution that takes just about 60 minutes of your time. First, installing the WordPress Advanced Category Excluder plugin and two, creating a JavaScript enhanced archives page that only exposes the posts and pages you want your users to see.
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This month’s briefing at Trend Watching, is all about “FREE LOVE”, companies giving away free valuable products and services to consumers online and offline as the latest trend in marketing. I thought this is a relevant article especially as regards to the C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace and of which we bloggers benefit from every day. We get free plugins from each other, free tools, free links, free traffic, all of which are valuable in our blogging successes. I touched on the value of “Free” things on the Web in an earlier article suggesting that good content on the Internet specifically may be worth paying for, and still, free content is only as valuable as its use to you. It’s interesting how Trend Watching breaks down how FREE LOVE came to be:
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It takes a little bit more finesse to search engine optimize (SEO) your WordPress blog compared to a regular website. But fortunately, the web being a particularly wonderful place, there are answers out there to make it a less painful and inexpensive experience.

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So, let’s say you have a website and a blog. You want to advertise your blog on your website. It’s easy enough to add a link to your blog on your website, but that’s amateur stuff. You can do better. Why not add your RSS feed for your blog on your website so that a list of your current posts (and links to them) appear on your website’s sidebar (or elsewhere).

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I have a wonderful SEO person whose taught me and continues to teach me all sorts of wonderful things about search engine optimization for my blogs and me websites. Last week while we were discussing a client’s website redesign project (on which we’re collaborating), she told me about “The Way Back Machine“. Have you heard of this? Here’s a summary from the about page of Archive.org:

“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.”

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So, if you’re looking for yet another way to increase web traffic to your blog, try going through your personal My Yahoo! and personalized Google pages to get your blogs indexed better on both Yahoo and Google search engines. How? Well, add your blog’s RSS feed to your personalized Google page and your My Yahoo! page. Below are step by step instructions on how to use your personalized Google and My Yahoo pages to potentially bring more web traffic to your blogs in a very simple way.

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When I think about marketing my blog, I don’t think of PR. But, blogging is a unique business requiring unique and numerous channels of marketing. There are the usual word of mouth, article submission sites like ezinearticles.com, getting well known guest bloggers to write an article or two on your blog, and so forth. But, PR, really? Well, Poles Apart Design is ready to announce a new partnership with an email marketing company, Constant Contact, and we’re looking to get the news out there quick, fast and hard. But, we’re still a new and small company.

I checked out a couple of PR sites like PR Newswire and Business Wire. Then I checked out PR Web and was quite impressed with what they had to offer, but more so with how they presented it to me. Check out this smart, creative way PR Web used video to market their PR services:
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As a small business owner myself, I look for unique ways to market my business without traditional advertising. I took a look at a few great online tools/websites that you could consider assets to your small business or yourself. One is Zvents, the only search engine for events. The second is Constant Contact, a small business centered email marketing program. The others are three must visit/bookmark sites: Local Biz Bits, All Business and Small Business SEM (Search Engine Marketing). [Read more →]