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:

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).

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.”

When I first began this blog, I suffered the same conundrum many beginning business bloggers suffered: How much is too much information? I didn’t want to give away so much info that the services my business offers can be of no use to them. It’s not as dire as giving away trade secrets, but blogging about WordPress design, content, tools, plugins, etc. sometimes means teaching readers how to, when to, and the where to of what I do, on some level. But, does it mean my readers can go out, install, develop, design, update, maintain, and fix bugs in their blogs after they read my posts? Not really. I don’t give away trade secrets, sure (not that much is “secret” in these days on the information superhighway). But, most importantly I’ve learned and I am still learning that what I know is one thing, what I and my business can do is another. Other business bloggers should know this too.

So I was working on a client’s blog recently and was having the most frustrating time trying to embed video onto the site. I recall also having the same trouble on my Film Tops blog. I went to WordPress’s Plugins page and low and behold, I found a solution with a simple plugin.

EasyTube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to embed a YouTube or Google Video in your blog post without WordPress assigning p tags where they don’t belong making your published posts and those below them screwy looking. Anyway, the cool thing about EasyTube is that the code you have to put in your post is soooooo simple: [youtube: URL] or [googlevideo:URL], that’s it! “URL” should be replaced with the actual URL where the YouTube or Google Video is found. You can also assign width and height: [googlevideo:URL width height] Fabulous, ain’t it!

In the previous article I talked about designing a Adding a Little Something Extra on Your Web Design from Head to Footer. Well, how about the in between too? It’s the end of the year and 2008 is literally around the corner, so why not give your website a fresh new look. Here are a few tips to make your website makeover a success:

Want to spice up your design with some great looking icons? Or perhaps your desktop needs more up to date, 3D icons? I scoured the web looking for icons for a project recently and found there are really amazing web icon sets created by great designers who offer them free to the public to use on websites, blogs and desktops. Damn, I love the Internet. Below are some of the best I found:

Icon Archives has some really great FREE icons. Two of my favorites is the Email Me and the Comic iPhone icon sets. Icon Archives has an extensive library of FREE icons.

Sometimes it’s hard to get motivated to write a post for you blog. Sometimes it’s hard to find what to write about. Writing every day, or every other day for a blog is time consuming and mentally exhausting. You won’t always know what to post next. The best advice I can give you is what I learned at school as a writing major, don’t think so hard. Explore the world around you. Take a nap. Socialize. Work on something else. History proves time and time again that you often find what you’re NOT looking for and that inspiration comes from all corners of your life.