A lot has been written about blogs as business and sales tools, but they can be valuable SEO tools as well. Although many experts are pointing to social networking as the media of the future, most of us still follow our favorite blogs and check in with them on a regular basis. In addition to entertainment value, a blog can improve your search engine optimization as well as inviting new people to your website and gaining valuable organic links. Many people look for quick fixes in SEO when in fact an occasional blog article can do wonders for improving your Page Rank over the long term. Here are a few ways to make your blog do double duty for your website—fostering sales and increasing your Page Rank at the same time.

Increase your profits with a business blog Video

#1 Make your blog part of your website. 

Most SEO experts recommend that you use WordPress if possible. While Blogger and similar websites make it easy to build and keep a blog, you need a platform that can be easily maintained on your own private site if you are trying to improve your Page Rank. WordPress is an blogging program that will make it easy to maintain and update your blog as a part of your overall website.

#2 Consistently offer fresh content. 

You should try to blog on a regular basis—once or more per day is ideal. Use keywords as much as possible, but focus on offering informative, well-written text. Google loves that stuff, and so do customers. The more helpful and informative your posts are, the more likely people will be to link to your posts. If you have trouble thinking of new things to talk about, do a simple search with your favorite keywords on social networking sites. There’s a good chance that whatever people are discussing, they are also searching for.

#3 Do the research. 

As with any other aspect of your website, it is important to research what terms and keywords are best for your blog. You should be focusing on timely, popular topics that are related to your business. Blogs are by nature interesting and enjoyable, so feel free to branch out into niche topics and try to have a little fun. This is an important area to keep tabs on, because the popular keywords change from day to day and sometimes even from hour to hour.

#4 Use your keywords as glossary and index terms. 

Tag every article with a relevant keyword and then make these keywords searchable on your website. This will increase your page ranking for these terms and make your blog easier for visitors to comb through.

#5 Be helpful. 

What is the best way to get organic, rank-building links to your blog? By being helpful and offering tips that people in your industry will want to pass on. If you are going to go through the trouble of building a blog, make sure the blog is informative and offers information that people will want to use and to pass on. As a bonus, add helpful links that make it easy for readers to ‘like’ your posts on Facebook and share them on other social networking websites.

#6 Syndicate. 

The best way of doing this is by including an RSS feed of your blog. For best results, use an RSS feed with the same domain name as your blog and website. RSS feeds will not only lead more people to your blog and thus your website, they will also help to build your SEO ranking by adding to your incoming links count.

#7 Stay on topic. 

Avoid the day-to-day stuff you would put in a paper journal and instead focus on topics related to your business. To put it plainly, don’t blog about your favorite restaurants unless you are running a restaurant or other food related business. Instead, talk about your industry. There are probably daily changes and news tidbits that can be reported and discussed. These will make it easy to organically work in keywords that will up your ranking and drive the right traffic to your website.

#8 Sound like an expert. 

You probably know a lot about your field and the products and services that you are selling. Use this knowledge base to entice and inform new customers—using keywords, of course. Don’t hide your light under a blanket; sound like the expert that you are. This will make people more likely to return to your blog for guidance and, eventually, to become loyal customers.

#9 Ask for backlinks. 

You don’t have to come out and formally request links to your blog articles, but you can certainly ask quietly by placing a “Link to this Article” tab at the bottom of every post. Often, people want to use their own blogs or social networking websites to discuss other blogs. Why not make it easy for them?

#10 Include a ‘call to action’. 

Even if you are building a blog for SEO purposes, you should still treat it as a sales tool. End every blog with a call to action that en-couRAges readers to become a conversion or a sale. You need as many conversions as possible to maintain a profitable business and to justify the time that is required in creating and maintaining an active blog.

Even if you aren’t convinced of the search engine value of a blog, there are several other good business reasons to create and maintain one. Blogs can increase exposure to your brand and increase sales on their own—and that’s not counting the higher traffic that comes from a higher Page Rank. They increase traffic to your website and also cause an increase in organic, relevant links, which Google counts heavily when determining your ranking. People like to read blogs. This media builds customer loyalty and brand loyalty (to your brand) like no other resource. Don’t let your business be without this valuable and proftable tool; start a blog today and see how this one media type can turn around your business around singlehandedly.

It’s a common story: small business owners begin a blog expecting customers to flock in droves. However, within a few months it becomes obvious that the blog simply isn’t working, whether it is failing to build a readership or increase sales. Many may be tempted to give up on blogging altogether, but there are several ways to make your small business blog an integral part of your brand and a potent marketing tool.

1. Offer fresh content on a regular basis. While customers don’t need to set their watches by your on-the-hour posts, you should offer content at a predictable pace. Some bloggers blog every day; some blog every week. The key is to make sure that people feel the need to continue checking back with your blog to see what’s new in your business. Keep in mind that your goal is not so much to blog, but to present your brand to potential customers. The more these customers return, the more they will interact with your brand. So keep them coming back for more by offering that something more!
2. Vary content. Don’t focus exclusively on long winded posts on the benefits of your product; that gets old in the first paragraph. Instead, offer fresh perspectives on news relevant to your business, talk about community events that are congruent with your brand, and build brand loyalty by showing your business’s human side with personal anecdotes and humor. You can throw in the occasional plug, but don’t make that the main subject. In the same note, don’t focus on text alone, instead including picture and videos for people who aren’t born readers.
3. Test your blog. Once you have posted, move to another computer and type your blog address in the browser. Look at the blog to make sure everything fits neatly and is congruent with the brand you are trying to develop. Click on links to ensure that they work. Pay close attention to things like loading speed that will chase away traffic before it evens encounters your message.
4. Design your blog to get traffic and to make it easy for that traffic to navigate. This means using SEO to give your blog a presence on search engines, but that’s not all. Make your navigation bar easy to find and easier to use. Allow customers to subscribe so they can see when you have added new information. More important, include information about your business in a prominent place so people who are interested can take the next step to becoming your loyal customer.
5. Inspire action. This may seem like it breaks my rule about varying content, but there are subtle ways to handle this. If you are blogging about fresh and relevant topics, there is no reason not to throw in a plug at the end for your products and services. If it is short and sweet enough, customers will not be annoyed. If anything, they may be pleased, especially if you are offering a solution to their problems.

Even a short year ago, it would have been impossible to predict the success of smart phones or the impact that they would have on our society. It is no longer unusual for a person to be completely dependent on their phone for email access, social networking, and even locating businesses. When savvy modern people want to find an ice cream shop or a barber, they turn to their phone. As you can imagine, this has huge implications for the way you run your small business.

First and most obviously, the smart phone revolution has changed the type of small business we are seeing in the technology field. A variety of phone apps provides relevant location services, encourages customers to try new products at stores they are entering, and offers special deals to customers who are near key advertisers. Some even provide time sensitive special deals for businesses near their current location, while will create a sense of urgency in a market that might otherwise pass them by. These small businesses are capitalizing on the fact that smart phones can track not just their owner’s shopping habits, but their owner’s precise location at that moment in time. Many local small businesses are contracting with these companies to offer special deals that build and solidify their customer base.

Second, the use of smart phones makes it all the more necessary to market your business in a way that reaches out to customers using this hip new medium. When even ten percent of your market is using a particular form of technology to get business information, it is important to begin dabbling in it yourself. Because technology such as this tends to grow exponentially (until it is replaced by a new technology, that is), you may miss out on a substantial amount of current and future sales by choosing to ignore it.

Third, small businesses should maintain their marketing through more traditional channels such as print ads, the internet, and telephone. This will prevent alienating the substantial portion of your customer base that has not yet become part of the smart phone revolution. While it may feel that you are being pulled in a variety of directions, a well rounded marketing plan is essential to success in the modern market.

Last, track your success using smart phone apps and other new technologies for marketing. If smart phones are bringing in a large percentage of new customers, put more of your energy into marketing through. If they seem promising but just aren’t bringing in results, consider using a new advertising company or otherwise changing your approach. If any type of marketing seems largely unsuccessful, then move on to marketing strategies that have been proven to work.

Keeping up with trends may feel silly and unnecessary, but it is an important part of small business success. As a savvy small business owner, you need to identify the venues your customers are using to find businesses like yours and then place yourself prominently on these venues. Constant change and innovation are the hallmarks that set small businesses apart from larger, more established ones, so don’t be afraid to try new ways of building your business.

We all have heard about small businesses that make it big using Twitter, Facebook, and other social media websites. Some websites—this one included—offer advice for what to do to help build your business through these free, low demand methods. However, there are certain moves that will compromise your social media marketing campaign before it even begins. Here are the five top social media mistakes a small business can make.

1 Not having a plan.

Your business is a brand, and everything you do for it should be carefully planned to be congruent with this brand. This includes social media. Everything moves faster in this medium. The wrong joke or choice of words can make enemies of people who would otherwise have been supporters. Failing to post on a regular basis can lose a hard-won fan base. Before you even open a profile, you should have a plan for who your target audience will be, how they will benefit from your site, and what you will do to win them over.

2 Not considering your target audience.

This is important because, as we mentioned above, everything you do will be for them. You probably already have a general demographic in mind, but think beyond this. How technologically savvy are they? What kind of information would persuade them to become loyal to your business? How can you best reach them and engage with them?

3 Not being consistent.

Your social media sites need to be regularly updated and maintained. More important, you need to be part of the online community. Respond to comments and tweets, post relevant information often, and get to know your customers. This is a once in a lifetime chance to develop a real long-term relationship with your customer base.

4 Wasting your customers’ time.

While it is important to post information on a consistent basis, don’t let this turn into such a chore that the quality of your posts or tweets begins to suffer. Give your customers informative and entertaining posts that are relevant to your industry and their own lives. Don’t be a walking commercial; people get enough of these in a modern world filled with guerilla marketing messages. If you build a relationship with your customers, they will naturally want to buy your products and services.

5 Not having a firm internet policy.

This should extend both to your business and your employees. You have a right to ask that your employees not act in a way that embarrasses your business—whether at work or not. Define how your company’s brand will be portrayed by their interaction with the community, both in person and online. Educate them about exactly what language and types of messages are okay in these contexts. Your employees are a reflection of your brand, and you need to ensure that they know how to act in a way that is brand-consistent.

Social media can make or break a business. By following these five simple steps, you can make sure that the time and money you spend to build an online presence pays off.

We all have heard the stories of businesses that made it big using social media, but most small business owners are unsure of exactly how to harness this powerful marketing tool. While it is easy for national brands to garner millions of online followers, it is a little more difficult for smaller businesses. Here are a few tips for using social media to build a small business.

1 Use multiple social platforms.

Don’t expect that Facebook alone will be sufficient, especially not before seeing what websites are being used the most by your customer base. Start out by creating a well branded presence on several different social media networks. Because many of your followers will also use multiple platforms, make sure you are posting some original content on each site. However, services like ping. fm allow you to post content on multiple sites, which can be handy when you are making an announcement or passing along important information about your business.

2 Don’t be ‘all work and no play’.

Your customers and fans did not sign up for a 24/7 commercial, and they won’t stick around for one either. Add content that is relevant to your area to ensure customer loyalty. You just may be a local expert on your industry, so act like one. Make your content short, relevant, and entertaining to keep people coming back.

3 Be consistent.

You can’t expect sustained interest in your business if you are only posting every few weeks. Ideally, you should post a few times a day, and these should be a good mix of commercial, informative, and entertaining posts. You can often set auto-posts to make this easier. If you have trouble thinking of content, try picturing your ideal customer. What do they need to know? How are they or should they be using your product?

4 Give people a reason to visit your social media sites.

All of your business’s contact information should be on these sites, as well as information on your products and services. Many businesses offer special discounts or promotions for social media followers, and these can help you track which platforms are the most lucrative. If you cannot afford to offer monetary value, simply offer good content that is relevant to your customers with out killing your company.

5 Act competitively.

Just because a social media site is free, many business owners treat it casually. You will have better results if you act competitively, the way you would if this were any other marketing tool. While there is no set amount of activity, you should try to do just a little more than your competitors. If you are the only one of the internet, you’re already doing fine. However, this is highly unlikely. There is a good chance that your competitors are using social media as well. See what they are doing and replicate what works. Further, try new ideas. This will allow you to learn from their mistakes while doing a little experimenting of your own. By learning to harness social media, you will provide your business of a free and highly effective form of marketing and branding.

Your business has a solid presence on the net; you’re tweeting, blogging, and have hundreds of Facebook friends and using social media help your small business. You’re done, right? Wrong! In order to set yourself apart from your competition, it’s important that you remain somewhat ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and marketing. Twitter and Facebook are important, but there is a new way to reach out to your customers online: the podcast. Well, it is not really new but if you have never tried to podcast, then I would consider that to be a new tool for you.

What is a podcast? It is basically your very own radio show, broadcast on the internet. It’s a chance to speak directly to potential customers. This technology represents the most modern type of online social media, which means that you will be ahead of the curve if you get in on the action. Here are a few tips to help you ensure that your podcasts are the brilliant marketing tool for entrepreneur that you need for them to be.

1 Create high quality recordings.

This means using adequate recording devices and software. It also means paying attention to volume, which should be neither too soft nor offensively loud. Trying to listen to a low quality recording is annoying and hardly the impression that you want to give your customers.

2 Structure your podcasts.

You should plan for them the way you would for a speech or presentation tips. Know the basic subject you will be discussing and have a list of talking points and ideas to cover. For best results, have a similar structure for every podcast. Your customers will enjoy the consistency and know what to expect. Most important—do not ramble or drone. No one wants to hear that. Stick to your subject and make it interesting.

3 Sound like an expert.

No one will want to hear a podcast that is mere opinion. You need to position yourself as an expert, someone that your community can trust for information about your field. This will make your business the natural place to turn for quality products. However, claiming to be an expert comes with accountability as well. Educate yourself about your subject so you can give accurate information that won’t damage your credibility.

4 Show some personality.

It’s okay to throw in appropriate jokes and relevant stories. Practice talking in a way that is engaging and interesting, with a variety of vocal inflections—listen to a few radio talk shows if you don’t know exactly what this means. This is a chance to connect to your audience, not a chance to bore them senseless.

5 Edit.

When you are done recording your podcast, listen to it and use a sound editing program to remove portions that are not polished. As you get better, you can move around segments and even add background music to give your podcast a professional feeling. Music and extras should not be the focus of your podcast, but they can give them a finished and professional feeling.

6 Monitor your customer’s experience.

Test your podcasts after uploading them to make sure the URL works and there are no glitches. Also, you should always subscribe to your podcasts so you can see exactly how your customers hear your podcasts.

If you are a small businessperson or interested in becoming one, one of your first steps should be to select an accounting logos software package. Accounting software is absolutely essential to maintaining the detailed, accurate records you need to run a business. The following five accounting software packages give small business owners everything they need to handle bookkeeping in an affordable and easy to use package.

QuickBooks Accounting Software Pro Edition.

Quickbooks is one of the most popular accounting software programs for small businesses and it’s easy to see why. This software includes not just accounting programs, but payroll management and other financial features as well. Quickbooks is easy to master and there are a variety of how-to books on the market detailing how it can be used and modified according to your needs. Quickbooks can be bought in a variety of editions, but the Pro Edition has certain extras that will make your life easier, such as a vehicle mileage tracker. This software is the golden standard of accounting software because it is easy to learn and includes everything you need to manage small business accounting.

BusinessVision 32.

BusinessVision is a great choice because it includes real time accounting, constantly updating all of the records as new information is entered. It uses Crystal Reports for credit reports, which makes it easy both to create reports from the data and to import any information into Microsoft Excel. Like many accounting software packages, BusinessVision comes in a variety of editions. BusinessVision 32 is custom-tailored to the needs of small businesses.

Microsoft Small Business Manager.

If you are already using other Microsoft Office programs, Microsoft Small Business Manager is an easy choice. This program is easy to integrate with other Office software and allows easy importing and exporting. Microsoft Small Business Manager has an intuitive design that allows users to use it as soon as it is installed. There are also many add-ons available, such as a PayPal account manager, that can be bought for a reasonable price if you need them.

MYOB Plus Accounting Software.

MYOB wins for versatility. This small business accounting program with a variety of features including ecommerce management. It is made to link to and work with Microsoft Office programs. This is an especially apt choice in accounting software if you will have multiple users, because the program is designed to accommodate several users.

Peachtree Complete Accounting Software.

Peachtree is a good choice if you will need to make regular reports, because this software comes with the benefit of being able to quickly and easily import information to more than one hundred different report templates. The design is intuitive and there is a feature for every need a small business owner might have, from inventory to time billing. The software is simple to learn because the screens resemble the paper documents once used for the same purpose.

As you can see, there are several excellent choices in small business accounting programs. Whether you want an easy program, a fully featured one, or one that integrates well with your other programs, there is sure to be a good choice in this short list for you. What’s most important isn’t which of these programs you choose, but that you select a program and begin keeping good records from the very start. Please read this article on logo software too.

Are you interested in starting a small business? Do you have an idea that you think is almost guaranteed to make money? If so, you might be interested in the following five basic tools, which will help your business open its doors with a good chance of success.

A Logo. Many businesses begin without a logo, but this is a mistake. A company logo is as important as your name because it is how your prospective customers will recognize you. Your logo will be the face of your business, present on business cards, stationery design, and even your office door. It is so important that there is no way to be successful without it. If you are starting a small business, getting a professional logo is the first step.

A Website. Many people view a website design as an option, but in the modern world it is a small business necessity. In the modern world, your customers are just as likely to turn to the internet to find a business as they are to look in the phone book. Having a website—a professional one that will interest your target audience—is one powerful way to keep the customers coming. As a side benefit, this website will allow you to have a more professional email address: yourname@yourbusiness.com.

An Audience. You may know a lot about your products and/or services, but what do you know about the people who will be buying them? You must know your target customer’s age, income, and aesthetic tastes so you can know what they want to buy, how they want to buy it, and what kind of shopping experience will bring them in as a customer and keep them coming back. Knowing your audience will allow you to better reach your future customers without wasting valuable time and money on people who aren’t interested.

Product Literature. In order to sell a product, you need to have a brochure design, marketing materials or other literature describing exactly what you are selling. This literature should include your business name and logo along with pertinent information about your company and product specifications. Although this may seem unnecessary, you won’t think so the first time you have the opportunity to hand your professional brochure over to a potential customer or vendor.

A Marketing Plan. Once you have your small business ready to open, you will need a marketing plan. This can be an expensive plan developed by a team of marketing consultants and graphic designers or simply an outline of how and when you will get your message into the hands of your audience. If you have an interesting story behind your product or another aspect of your business that is interesting and unique, you may want to market your business to news stations and other media.

Did you think this list was going to talk about accounting logos software or the latest telephone systems? These things are important, but they will not affect your business’s success in the profound way our top five will. The reason many small businesses fail is that they don’t pay attention to these five key areas. Giving your business the right start will ensure that you don’t become just another statistic and infinitely improve your odds of accomplishing your goals in a competitive market.

Graphic designers provide you with the tools to create an image for your business or website. They have the knowledge and the know-how to create the image that you desire. Just because you hire a graphic designer does not mean that you won’t be able to design your own company logo.

Whether you have any artistic abilities at all or not, graphic designers are able to use your ideas and design a company logo for you. If you have some artistic abilities, you can provide the graphic designer with a rough sketch of what you envision. You may also provide them with samples that you like and would like a variation of. You want to design a logo that is unique and you also want a logo that you can be happy with.

If you have no artistic abilities and absolutely no ideas, our logo design team are here to help you design a company logo. They will work with the name of your business and the industry that you are in. They will help you design your own logo by using different aspects and ideas of their own. You may provide them with any samples, logo ideas or colors that you would like to use. Working with a graphic designer can be a fun and informational process that will help design a company logo.

A business logo is an important part of your company’s identity and image in the market. A logo designer is able to help you design your own logo and create a unique look in the marketplace for your business. Discuss designing your own logo with a professional graphic artist. They will walk you through the process and help you design your own logo. They are also able to tell you which logo design plans are best for you and your needs based on your budget and revision requirements. The process of designing your own logo can be satisfying both personally and financially.

If you’re designing a page or running an e-store I bet you’re curious to know the behavior or reading pattern of your online visitors. Thanks to eye tracking method, researchers can analyze where online visitors are looking on your site. The output is what we call heatmaps.

Though this is a very useful tool, most entrepreneurs do not use eyetracking method for the simple reason that this service is not quite affordable. The good news is there are several sites simulating heatmaps to help you optimize your Web pages.

One such site is Feng-GUI. In essence, it answers one of the most important questions in Web usability: What your online visitors are looking at? Here’s the technical version:

The Feng-GUI heatmap is based upon neuro-science studies of feature integration theory, salience, visual attention, eye-tracking sessions, perception and cognition of humans.

It’s a user-friendly site. Just type your Web address, hit “enter”, and Feng-GUI will generate your heatmap in a few seconds. You can also save the image for your basis. Here’s a sample of heatmap for our main page.

How accurate is Feng-GUI compared to eyetracking? Of course, there’s really no substitute to a formal eyetracking research. Just take a look at the comparison table below and be the judge.

Via Neuromarketing

Colors have a strong impact on our logical or emotional state. For instance, red evokes sexiness or aggressive nature while blue is associated with calmness and loyalty. You might find it hard to believe but colors can even help treat some diseases.

It is no surprise then that finding the right color or color combinations is proven to boost your brands. It helps attract attention and set a mood for your customers. Though a great logo designer (read what to look for in a good logo designer) can help you choose the right colors, it is also valuable to learn this aspect.

A common mistake committed by many entrepreneurs is using more colors in their logo designs. Each color creates a single message or association. So if you are using 5 colors in your logos or brands, it will deliver 5 different messages. Unfortunately, consumers cannot handle that much perception.

The first thing you should consider in finding the appropriate color is your competitors. It is not wise to copy the color scheme of the leading brands for it will create an impression that you’re just a second-rate version.

Also, pay attention to the demographics of your market such as gender, age and culture. A trendy neon green might appeal to youngsters but painful to look at for your average grandmas and grandpas. In a way, it sets the limitation of the color you can use.

For more information about this topic, I suggest you pay a visit to Inspiration Bit for it offers a comprehensive discussion of the dos and don’ts of colors.

Disclaimer: The image is for reference only. Hence, copyright belongs to the respective owners. If you are the owner and wish to have the image removed from this post, please send an e-mail to remove-logo@logodesignworks.com.

Can’t think of creative and effective ad or slogan to go with your impressive logo design? Burnout happens even to very creative individuals. Also, not all entrepreneurs have the much needed creativity or enough resources to commission a branding agency.

In case you badly needed an ad or a memorable slogan, you can visit The Ad Generator by Alexis Lloyd. It is a free mashup tool which manipulates languages and images to create fake advertisements every 15 to 30 seconds. Here are some of their samples.

Here’s the explanation of his process:

Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold.

While some of the generated ads are really meaningless, visiting this site can guide you to the right direction or help spark the creativity within you. If you’re lucky, you might find the ideal slogan or ads for your small business here.

If you make a living from creative ideas like a great logo designer (read what to look for in a good logo designer) or painter or logo design, you ought to read the free e-book published by a London-based creativity coach Mark McGuinness entitled Time Management for Creative People (pdf).

Subtitled ‘Manage the Mundane – Create the Extraordinary’, this free 32-page book provides practical tips to help you maintain your creative focus while handling other business or personal commitments.

Undeniably there are numerous Websites tackling about time management but most of them are created for the consumption of the general public. Creative people, on the other hand, think differently. For instance, McGuinness pointed out most creative thinkers view organization, habit, and discipline as threats to creativity and not as good qualities to strive for.

Creativity is all about thinking outside the box and breaking the stereotypes. One of my favorite tips is to ring-fence your most creative time by asking the following questions:

When is your most creative time, when you are most alert and find it easy to focus?

If you could arrange your ideal schedule, what time would you ring-fence for focused creative work?

How close to your ideal schedule can you get within the constraints of your current situation?

Do you have a special place for creative work?

What physical triggers (such as pens, paper, computer hardware or software), rituals or routines do you use to get yourself in the right state of mind?

The e-book is under Creative Commons License, meaning you can share this on a noncommercial basis with any people you believe would benefit from these insights. Just keep the name of the author intact.

Via Creative Generalist

Whether you’re an aspiring graphic designer or not, there are times when you need to manipulate or edit images according to your needs. You might be blogger looking to improve the images in your site or simply an avid collector of memories. At the end of the day, most of us are after the same thing – high quality images.

Good thing Vivien of Inspiration Bit shared about Picnik, a FREE online image editor which allows you to manipulate photos to fit your needs. To make this tool more useful, you can install it as a Firefox or Internet Explorer add-on so you can just press right click on any image and you will have an option to pull that image to Picnik site for quick editing.

No need to buy expensive software like Adobe Photoshop for basic editing or download free graphic software and spend time to learn it. You just need an Internet connection and a Web browser.

It can be a stand alone application as well for non-heavy users. To make our lives a lot easier, it enables us to edit directly from popular sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and Facebook.

Picnik users can rotate, resize, sharpen, remove red eyes, and crop images as part of its editing functions. Looking at the sample image above, you can add text, shapes, frames, touch-up, and effects like sepia, black & white, matte, and many others as well.

Standard features are free of charge. If you love this simple tool and happen to be a heavy user, you can upgrade to premium account for only $25 per year or around $2 per month.

Via Graphic Design Blog

We already highlighted the difference between vector graphics and raster graphics. Just to recap, vector graphics are ideal for those perfectionist designers who want high quality images and razor sharp precision. More importantly, it gives you the flexibility to resize images easily without sacrificing image quality.

However, the problem is you need to have illustration programs like Adobe Illustrator or Corel. Good thing there is VectorMagic, an online tool that converts bitmap images to vectors for FREE. This simple to use tool is the outcome of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda.

You just need a decent browser like Mozilla Firefox, a Flash Player to see flash logo designs, and an image you want to vectorize. Just upload the image and this online tool will handle the rest. You can now resize the image without any pixelation whatsoever.

Source image can be in JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF format and you can download it in formats PS, SVG, PNG. See how this free service fares with Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE.

Whether you’re using this for your personal or professional images, one thing is sure – it’s time to say goodbye to pixelated images.

Via freewaregenius

Welcome to the seventh edition of the Carnival of Small Business and Startups (CoSBaS #7). If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please support this carnival by giving a link back to this edition as soon as you can.

Editor’s Picks

Here are this edition’s Editor’s picks.

1. Khalid Hajsaleh: Yeah, I’m Gonna Need You to Come in on Saturday. This would be darn funny if it weren’t so scarily true. As a former telecom company employee, I have an intimate understanding of what Khalid so accurately highlights in this article. But maybe you’ll get a good, wistful laugh out of it. Having been an assistant project manager, on the other hand, and knowing what “needs to be done”, I can only wonder what goes through the heads of some managers. Warning: some foul language.
2. SavingWithMe: 6 Small Businesses I Should Have Started In College. If you’re still in college, consider a few of these small businesses before you graduate. But you might want to think twice before running your own pedicab/ rickshaw. They’re a safety hazard on the road, and not to mention a hazard to your health – unless you think inhaling carbon monoxide from hundreds of cars all day is healthy. (You’re not moving as fast as a regular bicycle.) I love Jerry Seinfeld, but he did one bad thing: popularizing rickshaws in N. America for the past 15 or so years.One additional option: If you can cook, expand #5 to include becoming a personal chef to your college mates. Tell them that instead of them spending loads on takeout, you’ll make them a nice meal each day for a few dollars, with leftovers. Get a few students to buy in, and you can make them all the same meal, make some money or at least eat free.

Weekly Picks

Here are this edition’s regular picks.

1. Gavin Ingham: Cold-Calling Tips for Getting Through to the Decision Maker.
2. Edith Yeung: The 5 Rules of Writing Effective Email.
3. Lorraine Cohen: How Are You Networking?
4. Todd Goldfarb: 8 Tactics for Marketing a Small Business.
5. Chris Tackett: 5 Steps To Turn More Leads Into Cash!
6. Erik: Write A Successful Business Plan On Your Own.
7. Michelle Cramer: Implementing a Wellness Program.
8. Chris Russell: Improve Employee Productivity – Put Your Policy and Procedure Manuals Online.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 22nd, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival. Go check out the other three blog carnivals that I am managing, in case there’s a better fit for your article. I am pretty picky about categories.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more. This carnival is not about home-based businesses, specifically, although on occasion I’ll accept related articles if they are general in scope.

Welcome to the third edition of the Carnival of Better Blogging (CoBB #3). This Carnival covers any aspect of blogging: writing, design, analytics, infographics, SEO, etc. As always, there are some great entries this week. So please go check out the articles.

If your entry was accepted, support of this carnival of a link back to this page would be appreciated. If you did not get in, it’s likely you will be accepted in the next edition. Please: no one-paragraph articles or trying to push your affiliate links, and no pages with pop-ups/ pop-unders. These will be deleted immediately. I also have a current aversion to anything about BlogRush because they’re always from bloggers trying to get people to sign up (i.e., have affiliate links).

Enjoy.

Featured Post

This is the featured post for this edition.

1. Pat B. Doyle: Is Your Blog Easy To Read?
   Every blogger that enters blog carnivals (or not) should read this. When I have to go through as many submissions as I do (almost) every week, you win points in my editor’s book by having easy to read pages. Else your post has to be exceptional.

Weekly Picks

Here are the weekly entries for this edition.

1. Ant: 10 Questions to Ask When Writing Hypnotic Posts.
2. Doris Chua: 15 FREE Ways to Bring in New Readers to Your Blog/ Site.
3. Edith Yeung: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog – Part 1.
4. Vaibhav Gadodia: 9 Surefire Tips to Get Traffic to Your Site for New Bloggers.
5. Amanda Harris: Resources For Your Charities Website.
6. Mandy: How Do Bloggers Get To Take A Holiday?
7. Silicon Valley Blogger: Ways to Monetize Your Blog.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 22nd, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

Welcome to the second edition of the Carnival of Better Blogging (CoBB #2). This Carnival covers pretty much any aspect of blogging: writing, design, analytics, infographics, etc. As with the last edition, there are some great entries this week. So please go check out as many of the articles out as you have time for.

If your entry was accepted, support of this carnival of a link back to this page would be appreciated. If you did not get in, it’s likely you will be accepted in the next edition. [Please: no one-paragraph articles or trying to push your affiliate links. These will be deleted immediately.]

Enjoy.

Featured Posts

These are the featured posts for this edition.

1. Etienne Teo: The Comprehensive Secrets to Receiving Massive Traffic from Stumbling.
2. Peter Poffenberger: WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site.
3. Carole Fogarty: Prevent Leaking Energy in Your Work Space, Ouch! (Part 2 of Is Your Blogging Work Space With You or Against You?)

Weekly Picks

Here are the weekly entries for this edition.

1. Pinyo B: Top 10 Resources to Build a Better Blog.
2. Fred Peters: 10 Forums to Make You a Better Blogger.
3. Aahz: Top 10 Sites Every Blogger Should Join.
4. Taylor: Be Community Involved to Get More Traffic.
5. Thomas Slatin: Sneaky Cheap Website Promotion.
6. Marco Richter: Optimizing Your Permalink Structure.
7. Peter: Why You Should Blog.
8. Charles H. Green: Blogging vs. Podcasting.
9. Isabella Mori: The Z List: Are These My Worst Blog Posts?
10. Vanalli: How to Make Money Blogging.
11. Supermom in NY: Running a contest? Let these Contest Bloggers Know!
12. Madeleine Begun Kane: Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor).

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 15th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

You’ve produced an editorial calendar, have your writing tools and research sources. But you have a massive to-do list, including blog posts to write, and for some reason the darn things refuse to write themselves. What if you could get them to do that? I have – many times. I can’t tell you why it happens, but here are some tips that might just help you get your creative flow on.

1. Consume content. Not only should you consume a lot of content, you should consume a variety from different channels/ platforms:
   1. Print.
   2. Radio.
   3. TV Channels + film.
   4. Internet (print, audio, video).

   Consumption of a variety of content is the primary reason that writing usually (but not always) comes easy to me. Just make sure you’re capable of squirreling away facts for later use.

2. Change your point of view. This can be a physical change or a conceptual change. Move to another room, or put yourself in the place of a potential reader.
3. Take a break. Overtasking your mind, without a break, is the quickest way to squash creativity and become mentally fatigued. Light physical activity gets your blood flowing, which guarantees your brain is getting enough oxygen – something that might be hampered by sitting for long periods. Just getting up and walking around can help.
4. Change modes. If writing what you need to write isn’t happening, write something else. Write reviews, check out writing tools, write some email.
5. Sleep on it. If all else fails, setting a project aside for a night often gives you clarity. If you’ve done all the research, prep and planning you can, letting your subconscious take over frees up the creative side. Given all the prep, I often wake up with articles already written in my head, and simply have to type them up fast before they fade from memory.
6. Try creative exercises. Jason Rekulak’s book Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination(non-affiliate), is shaped like a block. And it’s packed full of good ideas. Try scribbling down answers to silly or fun questions, doodling or drawing. Write nonsense words that rhyme. Or not. Just don’t impose any limitations on yourself while you do this. You are not writing/ doodling for publication.
7. Eliminate guilt. Don’t think this will affect you? All I can say is believe me, it will. Guilt about something makes you focus on it the matter at hand, not your work. So you’re distracted and cannot think creatively.
8. Eliminate stress. Stress also blocks creativity. Take a micro-break by doing a bit of deep breathing, or turn on some familiar or creativity-inducing music that invigorates you and/or reminds you of good times.
9. Stop censoring yourself. Write what you want first, and what you need will come of it’s own accord. Not letting out what you want will produce writer’s block.
10. Emulate, then diverge. Successful fiction writers start by emulating the writers they enjoy. And over time, they develop their own style, by changing a few elements here and there. This advice applies to other types of writing, including blogging. But if you’re forcing yourself to develop a new style without knowing what it is, good luck finding creativity.
11. Utilize your cycles. Creativity is cyclical. As someone who’s been writing nearly 30 years, whether in my journal or professionally, I know this to be true. Utilize your peak times, forgive your lows. During the latter, you can do non-creative work such as research, administrative tasks, communications, commenting on other blogs or forums. Or you can brainstorm or map out ideas.

By Design links to various websites, blogs and resources related to blogging, design, analytics, and infographics. This round covers a domain name brainstormer, video search engine, video display widget, AJAX libraries, and a color tool.

1. Bust a (domain) name.
   

   Still considering a domain name for your website or blog? Not all the good ones are taken, despite what it might seem like. If you’re looking for the availability of the domains using a combination of words, try Bust A Name [via Randa Clay]. Just type in a few words in the “word combiner” and it’ll give you back a list of available domains using combinations of two words from your list. If a domain is available, you’ll get a drop down list that provides links to registrars.

2. Gujam Video Search Engine.
   

   Looking for video content for your website or blog? Gujam searches a number of video sites and returns the results collated for convenience.

3. WeShow video widgets.
   

   WeShow is a video sharing site that also offers a widget for displaying videos on a web page. The blog widget comes in one vertical and four horizontal formats, and each displays a snapshot of multiple videos that react when a mouse cursor hovers over them. You can customize the border color and select multiple content channel categories. Videos for selected channels for the widget appear to all come from YouTube, but I haven’t verified that.

4. MiniAjax.
   

   If you’ve been thinking about adding some Ajaxified dialogs, demo or info windows, draggable content, lightboxes, contact forms and much more, MiniAjax makes it easier. You can easily add a bit of “wow” to your site without having to code from scratch.

   MiniAjax is actually a portal to DHTML and JavaScript code available from several websites. There are snapshots of the use of each piece of code, along with an explanation. As far as I could tell, all of it is free.

5. Name That Color.
   

   Chir.ag offers a neat little color tool that can be used to learn color names. Drag the circle in the colorwheel or in the embedded color square, and the rectangular area to the right fills in with the selected color. Alternately, you can use the drop-down list of over 1500 colors. In addition to the RGB and Hex color values, the closest color name is show. There’s also a downloadable JavaScript library that you can use to embed the tool into your site.

For those of you considering building an online media empire – even a small one – go read Ben Yoskovtiz’s 10 Steps to Building an Online Media Empire. He profiles Wendy Piersall and her mini blog empire relating to stay at home parents. Plus he gives, as his article title suggests, 10 steps that you can follow as well.

Now granted, the steps are a nutshell explanation of what needs to be done, but they’re as good a starting point as any. Here’s the bold text from his article’s steps.

1. Build up a popular blog on a specific niche.
2. Develop a strong brand.
3. Make lots of friends.
4. Master monetization.
5. Learn more about marketing.
6. Find opportunities offline.
7. Get help.
8. Be a teacher.
9. Realize it’s a business.
10. Expand slowly but promote like a crazy.

Blogging is sort of similar to golfing, in the sense that if you want to be good at it – and thus successful – everything has to be aligned. It’s not just about writing, and if you build it, “they” won’t necessarily come. It takes promotion and other efforts in tandem.

I want to particularly emphasize Ben’s points #2-4:

• Strong brands are memorable; they draw people back, whether because of a great logo design, an attractive website design, or a catchy name.
• Making friends online is as important as building relationships with customers for offline businesses. Friends will link to you, watch out for you, vote on social media sites for your articles, and vice versa.
• It’s all for naught if you don’t come up with an effective way to monetize. But online commerce really still is in its infancy, and monetization models might change. Stay on top of them.

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Carnival of Small Business and Startups (CoSBaS #6). If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please support this carnival by giving a link back to this edition as soon as you can. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with the opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking. Enjoy.

Weekly Picks

Here are this week’s weekly picks.

1. Ben Yoskovitz: Warning: Do You Know Your Best Customers?
2. Jim Smoot: Difference Between A Manager and A Leader.
3. Warren Wong: Be A Good Manager By Letting People Learn And Grow.
4. Sue Massey: Do You Know How to Delegate Effectively?
5. Michelle Cramer: Inexpensive Ways to Conduct Marketing Research.
6. Chris Russell: Office White Noise.
7. Nenad Ristic: Attribution Theory.
8. Satish Talim: Setting Up An IT Company In India.
9. Jenny How: China 102nd Canton Fair (Chinese Export Commodity Fair) 2007.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 8th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival. Go check out the other three blog carnivals that I am managing, in case there’s a fit for your article.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more. This carnival is not about home-based businesses, specifically, although on occasion I’ll accept related articles if they are general in scope.

Welcome to the first edition of the Carnival of Better Blogging (CoBB #1). This Carnival covers pretty much any aspect of blogging: writing, design, analytics, infographics, etc. There are a lot of great entries in this issue. So please go check out as many of the articles out as you have time for.

If your entry was accepted, please support this carnival by giving a link back to this edition as soon as you can. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with the opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking. If you did not get in, it’s likely you will be accepted in the next edition. [Please: no one-paragraph articles or trying to push your affiliate links.]

Enjoy.

Featured Posts

Here are the featured posts for this edition.

1. Pat B. Doyle: 23 Great Ideas For Blog Posts.
2. Carole Fogarty: Is Your Blogging Work Space With YOU or Against YOU?
3. Sutocu: Link Building Naturally with Link Baits.
4. isabella mori: flaming vs. appreciative communication.

Weekly Picks

Here are the remaining entries for this edition.

1. Edith Yeung: Want More Traffic? Find Out Here.
2. Ken Xu: Top 3 Idea Stimulators.
3. Silicon Valley Blogger: How I Boosted My Woeful Web Traffic.
4. K T Cat: The Pareto Principle and Corporate Blogging.
5. Rob: How to Improve your Google Ranking. [Video]
6. Bill Henderson: Writing a Good Blog Post.
7. Vanalli: How to Write Successful Blog Posts to Make More Money Blogging.
8. Etienne Teo: A Change in Blog Design and a Change in Fortune.
9. Charles H. Green: Trust Networks vs. Search Engines.
10. Doris Chua: Don’t Stop Blogging!

Bonus Entries

Here are some additional entries that I felt might be of interest, which are not specifically about blogging tips, design, or monetization.

1. If you’re interested in the finance/ economics niche or accounting, Laura Milligan presents the Top 100 Economics Blogs.
2. Don’t know what to do all the money you make from your blog? Read Millionaire Mommy‘s The Powerful (and Addictive) Nature of Giving. She’s using her bounty to finance women entrepreneurs.
3. This has nothing to do with blogging, unless of course you’re not making money from your blog and have the blues. Read Gustav S‘ 10 Ways to Keep Yourself Happy.
4. But if it’s simply productivity issues you’re dealing with, read Julie Anne Bonner‘s My Unbalanced Life – Top 7 Things I Do To Stay Sane and Productive.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 8th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

By Design links to a variety of articles found online, with topics relating to design, blogging, information interfaces, analysis and more. This round summarizes articles about web surfing, color theory, and data charting.

1. Web surfing.
   

   Wisdump shows you how to surf like Tom Cruise. Surf the web that is. Read the article and you’ll understand the connection between the interesting web interfaces profiled there and the science fiction movie Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story. [For another wild information interface, watch Paycheck, another movie based on a PKD story, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman.]

2. Home Page: Full Post or Excerpts?
   

   The more websites you surf, the more likely you are to prefer excerpts on each home page. Or will you? I personally don’t. I like full-text on home pages and in RSS feeds. It’s a necessity for me because of the amount of content I have to browse regularly. But some people prefer it.

   An alternative is to have full-text on the home page and excerpts on archive pages (page 2, page 3, etc.). If that’s something you like, Daniel and Daily Blog Tips has a free Homepage Excerpts plugin for WordPress blogs. Previously, David at Xfep  did the same thing manually and provided some WP PHP code.

3. Color harmonies and matching.
   

   EasyRGB offers a set of tools for those of  you that work with color:

   1. Color matching.
   2. Color harmonies.
   3. Color calculator.
   4. Monitor calibration.
   5. Tint searching.

   In addition to these web-based tools, they offer EasyRGB-PC, which runs on Windows computers.

4. Browser-safe colors.
   

   Website Tips provides an easy-reference grid of browser-safe colors, organized by hue. These are the colors that are supposedly consistent on any computer monitor, provided they’re calibrated. Also see Design Vitality, who offer the meanings of basic colors, in terms of moods set.

5. Charting tools.
   

   Need to create charts from data on the fly? PHP/SWF Charts [via WebAppers] is a tool for PHP scripts that generates Flash charts and graphs. There’s also an XML/SWF version that functions the same way with other scripting languages including ASP, Perl and more. Both have a full complement of standard charting and graphing features – including lines, columns, pie, candlestick, and more – so they can be used for a variety of data.

Not everyone agrees, but Technorati does have value to bloggers. If you agree, then you also probably feel that being on their  Technorati Top 100 at least gives your blog authority, and probably additional traffic as a side effect. It might also result in your blog accumulating more back links. So it behooves you to at least try aiming to get on their list – an activity which is essentially an exercise in link building.

Disclaimer

The fact that none of the blogs I write for are on the Technorati 100 (but a few of them are actually closing in) should tip you off to the fact that this article is speculation. However, it is speculation based on sound link building principles that I’ve learned after over a year of intense application of these principles. So, here are some tips for making your way towards the Technorati 100.

Premise

Being on the Technorati 100 list will bring you fame and fortune. Well, at least blog authority in your niche.

5 Rules

Here’s what you need to keep in mind, before you apply the 7 methods listed below.

1. Aim high.
   Build at least as many backlinks as the blog at position #100 in the Technorati 100. Then build more.
2. Plan ahead.
   Have a strategy to keep garnering backlinks from both new blogs and those already linking to you.
3. Factor in the momentum value.
   Technorati only counts blogs giving you a backlink for 180 days. That is, if Blog B links to Blog A today (as far as Technorati is concerned), blog B needs to link again before 180 days are up – counted from today. If that doesn’t happen, the backlink from B ceases to be considered in A’s Authority measure.
4. Could you repeat that?
   Repeat your link building strategy. If you gain, say, 10-20 new links every week of the next year, that’s about 500-1000 new links per year. Even with Technorati’s 180-day link value expiry, you’ll get noticed and gain links from elsewhere.
5. Set limits.
   Give yourself a time limit to reach #100. You can and should aim higher, though do it in stages. If you are aiming for #1, expect it take a while, even if you have a team of bloggers, link baiters, and SEOs.

7 Ways

These are only seven ways that might get you on the Technorati 100. They are neither the only ways nor are they guaranteed. It’s the sum of the parts, not any individual method, that will carry you up the list.

1. Target the Linkerati.
   The Linkerati are those people online that are most likely to link to you or get someone to do so. Suggestion: start by linking to all the blogs in your niche that are in the top 101-500 positions at Technorati.
2. Target the movers and shakers.
   Next, after success with Linkerati, target the blogs on the Technorati 100 list. These bloggers are much harder to get backlinks from, for several reasons:
   1. They get so many backlinks that they don’t “see” yours.
   2. They don’t know you.
   3. You are not in their niche.
   4. They know you and consider you a threat because you are following the suggestions in this article.

   At the least, linking to relevant authority blogs in a way that’s useful to your readers will build your authority, possibly amongst search engines. That will eventually pay off because other bloggers will take notice and link to you.

3. Be a profiler.
   Profile each and every blogger on the 100 list. Then email/ contact every one of them. Don’t expect 100% success in catching a backlink, but if you score even a handful of PR6-10 links, it’s worthwhile. You can also profile each blog on the 100 list. Indicate their method of monetization, posting frequency, age, etc.
4. Be an ass-kisser.
   This networking advice comes courtesy of Ryan Caldwell at Performancing. There are lots of top bloggers that will be happy to help you online. You have to find them, then give them something before expecting something back.
5. Be analytical.
   Analyze the Top 200 (authority, subscriptions, backlinks, or content-wise) and present it in an interesting fashion, with outbound links to select sites (at least 20).
6. Give credit.
   Come up with your own blog awards for various niches, and link to the Top 200. The Catch-22 is that your blog needs some authority (high subscriptions, medium PR) else the award may not be taken seriously. A quality, meaningful Awards scheme will still produce some backlinks, though it may require a year’s worth of work before that shows, so prepare in advance.

   If you can’t come up with blog awards try web award for resource sites or web applications. Be unique. Remember to contact each site about your Awards, and cross your fingers. If you’re really lucky, they’ll link back to you from their own official blog, which will count in Technorati.

7. Have a plan.
   Come up with other clever ways to get back links from blogs. Present info about a selection of sites. This could be some interesting way that you’ve clustered similar sites and made it easy for a reader to use. Or you could analyze trends [via ChrisG.com] in the Top 100 and publish that – making sure you link out to those sites. Keep in mind that you do not need to be on Digg to make the Technorati 100.

Return

The idea is that if you link to enough of these blogs regularly, and you have good content on your blog, at least some of them will link back eventually. At first, you’re more likely to succeed with bloggers in your niche in the 101-500 positions. That should increase your backlinks and thus your Technorati authority. Then, if you try again with blogs in #1-100 positions, you might just find that you get enough high authority backlinks that everything else falls into place.

Alternatives

There is another way to get on the Technorati 100 which I have not mentioned yet. That’s to be “favorited” by other Technorati members. Personally, I think that this is a lot harder to control or “calculate”, and it does not increase your Technorati authority. It also gets gamed due to “reciprocal favoriting”, which may get discounted in the future. I believe in organic link building, which means not targeting the favoriting method.

Caveats

On the other hand, now that I’ve revealed all this, it might be that much harder. Most bloggers will not want to lose their spot. Some will be climbing up the list themselves, and some might even not link to you out of spite. However, since the Top 100 bloggers are unlikely to be reading this article, you’re probably safe.

Conclusion

You’re probably asking why all this is any different than your current link building plan. In the worst-case scenario, attempting all this will garner you attention from other bloggers not in the Top 100.

The algorithm used to calculated the Top 100 is not necessarily perfect, it’s subject to change and being gamed. However, aiming to be on it gives you a mental focus. Simply by trying, you’ve put yourself in the mindset of producing a better quality blog, which in turn will result in an increase your blog’s authority and ranking. If you’re persistent with your goal, you might just get into the Top 100.

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Small Business and Startups (CoSBaS #5). If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please support this carnival by giving a link back to this edition as soon as you can. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with the opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking. Enjoy.

Featured Posts

Here are this week’s featured posts.

1. 5 Ways to Act Like an Expert in Online Communities by Scott Allen.
2. The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains by Alvaro Fernandez.
3. Do You Have An Abundant Mindset? by Warren Wong.

Weekly Picks

Here are the remaining entries for this edition.

1. 5 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Marketing Overnight by Eric Hudin.
2. 7 Ways to Expand Your Products and Services by Terry Dean.
3. It’s Up To You – Make Customer Service A Positive Experience by Jason Rakowski.
4. Keys to Effective Holiday Marketing in 2007 by Frances Palaschuk.
5. Spending Those Hard Earned Dollars On Advertising by Matt Hanson
6. The Challenge of Providing Choice by Wilson Ng.
7. Top Ten Franchise Opportunities for $20,000 by Tom Stanley.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Aug 24st, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival. Go check out the other three blog carnivals that I am managing, in case there’s a fit for your article.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more. This carnival is not about home-based businesses, specifically, although on occasion I’ll accept related articles if they are general in scope.

Links to articles about building trust with readers, improving or protecting your search engine rankings, and buying backinks safely. Note that a few of these articles are for more advance readers, in terms of implementing their advice.

1. Building trust.
   

   David Dairey offers some simple ways to build trust with your website readers. While these are easy tips, many blog and site owners have either forgotten to update or don’t know any better. This includes tips such as making contact info easy to find and including a photograph.

2. Annoying site design decisions.
   

   It takes more than trust to keep readers coming back. Does your site have design elements that might be annoying your readers? Check out DevLounge’s list of 15 annoying design decisions. To that list I add “low-contrast” pages. That is, colored backgrounds with gray text, and in a small font no less. I find this combo very hard on the eyes, especially at night. The shame of it is, it’s often on the sites of blogs I really like.

3. Fix your home page URLs.
   

   Do you know from how many different URLs most blogs’ home page can be accessed. If the number 8 surprises you, then you need to do something. Not doing something can mean that some search engines think you have duplicate content. It’s unfair but true.

   Here’s the basis of the variations:

   • With or without “www.” in front of your domain name.
   • With or without trailing “/” at the end of your URLs.
   • With or without “index.php” (only applicable to some blog platforms and CMSes).
   • A combination of the above.

   A combination of the above results in eight unique URLs. Chris Hooley offers an .htaccess tutorial to canonicalize your URLs. That simply means redirecting them to a single consistent URL. Note that this is a more advanced tutorial. If you don’t understand it, beg a more tech-savvy friend to help you.

4. Protect your search engine rankings.
   

   Even if you protect your search engine rankings by canonicalizing your URLs, it’s still possible that someone can steal your rankings. And with your own content on their site. Scary but true. Read SEO Fast Start’s article Google Proxy Hacking [via Sphinn]. While you’re at it, also read Hamlet Batista’s 10 Ways to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO.

5. Buying links safely.
   

   So you’ve built trust, improved your design, fixed your URLs, and protected your search engine rankings. Now what? Well, amongst other things, you need to build links.

   If you are of the opinion that it’s okay to buy links, then read Aaron Wall’s How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer and Andy Beard’s Paid Links & Reviews are Necessary for Relevant Results. One solution, by the way, is to sponsor weblog themes.

While surfing through the blogosphere randomly, I came across a Problogger post pointing out a reader comment by Jason, about how he (Jason) maintains both a full-time job and keeps up his blogging momentum. Many new bloggers find they run out of steam and lose focus. It happens to more experienced bloggers, too.

Jason uses a point system with different amounts for different tasks. Then he ensures that reaches a daily minimum of 50 points.

If you can maintain such a disciplined habit, it seems like an ideal way to ensure you’re doing something everyday that’s related to blogging. Darren Rowse added a few items to the list. Here are a few more tasks to add to the point system. The numbers in brackets are a suggested point
value for each task.

1. [2] Site maintenance/ fixes.
2. [3] Theme tweaking.
3. [5] Ad placement research and application.
4. [5] Topic research.
5. [15] Key content (tutorials, resource lists) and linkbait articles.

What points you actually assign to these tasks above is up to, depending on how important you feel they are. This sort of method will not work for everyone, but it could help some bloggers.

This is a roundup of blog carnivals that articles from either this blog or our sister Small Business Tips blog have been accepted into recently.

1. The article Better Websites: 7 Elements of Good Link Building Articles was published at the following carnivals:
   1. Make Money Blogging.
   2. Making Money Online – Edition 3.
   3. Working at Home Blog Carnival #45.
   4. Webmaster Articles Blog Carnival Aug 2007.
2. Making Money Online – Edition 6 published Better Websites: 10 Article Research Sources.
3. Make Money Blogging – Aug 31 published Improve Your Site’s Look With 15 Easy Tips.

If you’re interested in visting blogs similar to this one, go check out the above carnivals. Don’t forget about our sister blog’s Small Business Tips Carnival (submission page). This blog wil also soon be hosting the Better Blogging Carnival. If you do start using blog carnivals to promote your blog, also see 10 Tips for Managing Your Blog Carnival Submissions.

While doing some semi-random surfing using Stumbleupon, I came across a website, 10 Ways, that is a collaboration of five designers, each with two projects. Two that caught my eye are Light and Information, both found under project Sumona. They are variations on a similar idea, using images (from Getty Images) in a fascinating way.

Light has a collection of images mapped onto a a rotating sphere that you can interact with.

Information starts with an initial image, and as you zoom in on area, you see a grid of smaller images that constitute the image – like pseudo-pixels. The idea is not new, but it’s presentation on a website is not one I’ve seen before.

I recorded a 3 minute screencast of a “journey” through Information, which you can see below. Please note: all of the images used in the Information project and thus the video below are property of Getty Images.

If you haven’t explored Technorati, the blog search engine, you might be surprised at what a great tool for bloggers that it is. This short list shows you there is more to Technorati than you might realize, and many of the features are useful to bloggers.

1. Find hot terms: top searches.
   Want to know what people are searching for on Technorati? Check the Top Searches list. If you search for the same terms a fair bit, use the Watchlist feature, which acts like an automated search aggregator.
2. Find hot terms: top tags.
   Technorati indexes blogs and assigns one or more tags for each blog post. The Top Tags tag cloud displays what tags are most common at the moment. This data can change at any time Technorati indexes new blog posts anywhere in the blogosphere. Note that Technorati tags might overlap blog platform categories but are not the same.
3. Find popular rich media.
   Want to know what videos, music, movies, games and other items are popular right now? Technorati scans blog posts – that it has indexed – for links to known “media” sites such as YouTube, IMDB and Amazon and builds a Popular list.
4. Blogosphere search.
   Search for blog posts mentioning a specific keyword/ phrase. The results are displayed starting from the freshest.
5. Find niche blogs.
   Search for blogs falling into a specifc niche category. This is a great tool for building up Top X Blogs lists for a certain category.
6. Track backlinks.
   Use their Cosmos feature to determine who is linking to you. Amongst other uses, this also helps you track blog carnivals you might have been accepted into.
7. Get traffic.
   Once Technorati indexes your blog, that could bring you traffic, especially if you are writing in a popular niche. It’s not guaranteed, but it could help.
8. Spread trends
   That’s “Where’s the Fire?”, not the other meaning. WTF is Technorati’s social voting feature. Submit a brief description of a topic to create some buzz about it. You can include relevant links, so a WTF might bring you traffic. Just don’t spam WTF.
9. Claim your blog(s).
   Let other Technorati users know that a blog is yours by claiming it. You can even put an avatar up if you like, and your bio.
10. Favorite some blogs.
    The Favorite feature simply aggregates the latest posts from any blogs you add to it. They can be your own or someone elses. Essentially, you can use it in lieu of an RSS reader.
11. Customize Technorati tools.
    Use the Technorati API to build custom applications, or use one of the many widgets or plugin tools.
12. Find popular blogs.
    See what sites have the greatest buzz going. Blogs listed in the Technorati Top 100 already get a lot of traffic, but being on the list is sort of self-perpetuating. Or at least it had been, and many bloggers complained that they didn’t stand a chance at cracking the list.

    Then Technorati started applying a sort of momentum measure for Authority. That is, Authority indicates the number of sites linking to your blog, but those links are no longer permanently recorded in Technorati. They’re only good for 180 days. So newer popular blogs now stand a chance of knocking off veteran bloggers.

Bonus Use: Web 2.0 logo mashup random slideshow.
Here’s how to have some real web 2.0 mashup fun. This is completely frivolous, but a bit of entertainment.

1. Sign up for a free Technorati API key.
2. Pick a term, any term.
3. Build a Yahoo! Pipe and use the URL Builder and Fetch Feed modules to retrieve search results for that term.
4. Sort results chronologically (most recent first).
5. Use the Term Extractor module to extract any keywords.
6. Use the Loop and Flickr modules to pull 1 or more images that have tags related to each extracted term.
7. Feed the output URL to a slideshow player such as SplashCast.

It’s quite possible I’ve forgotten something, since there’s a lot more to Technorati than just a blog search engine.

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Small Business and Startups (CoSBaS #4). If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please support this carnival by giving a link back to this edition as soon as you can. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with the opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking. Enjoy.

Featured Posts

Here are this week’s featured posts.

1. Simplified Online Marketing by Becky McCray.
2. A Motivation Secret of Top Performing Managers by Dr. Robert Karlsberg and Dr. Jane Adler.
3. The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires by Susan Velez.

Other Entries

Here are the remaining entries for this edition.

1. Seeking a Dream by Michelle Cramer.
2. The Name Game – Why the Right Name is Important by Jim Smoot.
3. Make People Comfortable By Greeting Them Right by Warren Wong.
4. Planning a Business Trip by Mike Harmon.
5. Are You A Good Facilitator? by Louise Manning.
6. Enhancing Human Performance by Chris Russell.
7. Amazon the Services Operating Ecosystem by Abhishek Tiwari.
8. Want to Waste Some More Time Before You Start Your Business? by Stefan Töpfer.
9. Going to the Top Too Fast by Wilson Ng.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Aug 19th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival. Go check out the other three blog carnivals that I am managing, in case there’s a fit for your article.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please. I am now deleting the entries of anyone who submits more than one per week. It’s up to you to choose one good entry, not me.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more.

Having run a few blog carnivals for a couple of months now, one thing I’ve noticed that’s fairly common is that if a new blogger produces a relatively longer piece of “key content”, it’s often unformatted. That is, it looks like one big mass of visually intimidating text. There are no bullet points, no headings or subheadings.

Reasons

Here are a few reasons to use the latter, plus a couple of tips on how. The reason for bullets should be evident in the list below.

1. Eases scanning.
   Makes it easier to scan an article:
   1. Adds white space, reducing text density and also eye fatigue.
   2. Defines information hierarchy, cueing the mind on how to absorb blocks of information.
2. Adds authority.
   Partitioning information with headings and subheadings can improve search engine ranking authority for a page. It’s not guaranteed, but if you are producing lengthy resource articles (aka “key content”), headings can help with rankings. (This depends on other factors, including search engine algorithms.)

3. Eases production.
   Starting with your headings and subheadings when writing a long article to make it easier to produce such key content. The reason is that you have easily definable sub-tasks to work on, not one massive task that seems endless.

What to try

Here are a few options for heading use.

1. HTML headings.
   Try HTML h2-h4 tags for maximum effect. (H1 in most blogging platforms is used for the title of your article.) You can even customize h5-h9 if you prefer, by tweaking the necessary CSS.

   Keep in mind that the smaller the “n” in the hn tag used, the more important it is. That is, your primary subheadings should use, say, h2. The next level of subheadings should then use h3. Follow the hierarchy, as you would with headings in a word processor app such as Microsoft Word.

2. Bolded headings.
   Try HTML bold/strong tags on a line by themselves, followed by a “br/” (line break) tag.

3. Other options.
   Try underlines (solid, dotted, dashed, hairline, colored), colored heading text, different fonts, boxes, colored backgrounds (of the heading text), etc.

Summary

Using headings and subheadings (and bullet lists with bold short phrases) make it easier on your readers’ eyes, easier to absorb information. That makes them more likely to return, since you’ve made the effort to not only make their reading experience convenient, but informative with your key content.

Blogging carnivals can be a very effective way to promote your website and build links. They’re free, requiring only your time to find and submit URLs to appropriate carnivals, and writing good content to submit.

I’ve been running several carnivals for clients and it gets tedious at times to keep track of submissions. Because many blog carnival hosts prefer only one submission per person per week, it’s simple etiquette to track the URLs you’ve sent, when you did, etc.

If you are running a link building campaign, it’s also good to track which carnivals accepted your entries so that you can link back. (It’s also carnival etiquette, though unfortunately too many bloggers don’t bother linking back.)

Keeping track of at least your carnival submissions simply takes a bit of organization.

Basic strategy:

1. Create two spreadsheets for weekly use:
   1. Track the articles you’ve submitted and where.
      • Column 1: URL of the article submitted.
      • Col 2: Date of submission.
      • Col 3: Carnival name
      • Col 4: Status (accepted or not)
      • Col 5: If accepted, then the URL of the carnival edition.

      Update this spreadsheet whenever you (1) have a new quality article to promote, (2) have submitted an article to a carnival, or (3) have been accepted to a carnival.

   2. Track most recent submission to any carnival. There is obviously a bit of overlap, but this sheet also serves to be an easy reference to any carnivals you’ve previously submitted to.
      • Col 1: Carnival name.
      • Col 2: Carnival submission page URL.
      • Col 3: Homepage of carnival [optional].
      • Col 4: Next edition [optional]
      • Col 5: Last URL submitted.
      • Col 6: When submitted.

      What I do is after a submitted article has been published to a carnival, I clear out the info in Cols 5-6.

   Summary:

   • From spreadsheet 1, I can see which articles haven’t been promoted enough, whether due to lack of enough submissions, or because they were not accepted.
   • From spreadsheet 2, I remind myself to check if a carnival submitted to has published the article in question.
   • I use Google Spreadsheets because they’re easy to use and can be shared teammates and/or clients.
2. Each week, choose 2-3 articles to submit to 3-5 carnivals each. Keep in mind that your blogging niche may or may not have enough weekly carnivals. Do your best. Get creative in the next step.
3. For each article you intend to submit, make a short list of 3-5 keywords/ tags/ categories.
4. Using the first item in the keyword list for an article, search for appropriate carnivals at BlogCarnival.
5. Read over the carnival description, and if you’re article suits, submit it.
6. Repeat this with any of the keywords until you’ve submitted the same article to 3-5 different carnivals.
7. Repeat the process with each article you’re promoting that week. Remember to keep track in your spreadsheets.

Additional strategy:
Here are a few extra tips that I use.

1. If you’re having a hard time finding appropriate carnivals:
   1. Make a mindmap of the article titles to be promoted.
   2. Brainstorm keywords for each title..
   3. Now search for new carnivals for each keyword.
2. Were you accepted to any carnivals? Track accepted submissions in Technorati. Simply type in your blog’s full homepage URL in the Technorati search field to see what blogs have linked to you. (If a website links, Technorati will not pick it up.)
3. Automate the tracking process using the Technorati API and custom code. I use the API features in a custom Yahoo! Pipes pipe to first search for any “Cosmos” links to my blog, then filter the list further by only looking at entries with the word “Carnival”. Unfortunately, due to some glitch, this Pipe only works in debug mode. I’ll release it here when it functions properly.

It boils down to this: there are so many weblogs out there that if you start a new one, it might take you a long time to build any traffic. Under normal circumstances, that’s your likely path. But if you start acquiring methods to build your blog’s profile, you can change your fate away from anonymity.

If you have the budget for full-blown SEO services, great. If you don’t, you have the option of doing nothing, or using Kaizen – a philosophy of constant improvement by slow degrees.

There are many things you can do, by degrees, to improve your website‘s authority, popularity and ranking – much of which I hope to discuss on this blog over time. It’s not enough to just have an ambitious editorial calendar or to simply write great linkbait. You also have to promote your website.

One of the best ways to do this is through SMM – Social Media Marketing. There are several types of social media sites, but the ones we’re focusing on in this post allow you to setup a member profile, submit articles, and vote and possibly comment on submissions.

The drawback for wallflowers is that most social media sites frown on people submitting their own articles. You need to make “friends” who have similar article tastes and niche interests, add them to your “follow” list, and hope that they add you at some point. When they do, they’ll watch for what you submit or vote on, and may add their own vote. If you establish real friendships, you can ask them if they’ll submit your articles.

To help yourself towards that goal, it’s good to find articles elsewhere that you feel are high quality, then submit those, hoping people will vote. The better/ more useful/ more targeted the article, the more likely it’ll garner votes and show up on the home page, thus increase your success rate. So it does take a fair bit of effort to use social media, and if you don’t have the time to build a profile, you might have to hire an SMM. But if you choose the most appropriate sites for your niche, SMM is very effective.

Here are a list of the social media sites I use regularly, whether to promote articles of friends, vote on items of mine that others have submitted, or simply to check out what’s new:

1. DailyHub.
   Targets mostly the business and entrepreneuring niches. This site is still in beta, as far as I know. So it does not yet send a lot of traffic. I use it already to build my profile.
2. Del.icio.us.
   General bookmarking site with “save” feature, which amounts to voting.
3. Digg.
   Choose categories wisely when submitting articles, else face the wrath of Diggers. More tech-oriented, but with other categories.
4. Reddit.
   General. Use it regularly or your account will disappear. Heavy on politics and pictures.
5. Smoochr.
   Various categories, including business, entertainment, travel and more. The site is still in alpha, with bugs to be worked out. But build your profile “karma” now, for later promotional rewards. [Disclaimer: I'm part owner.]
6. Sphinn.
   Geared towards SEO/ SEM/ SMM. You can submit your own, but fresh approaches are what the more experienced members want to read about.
7. Stumbleupon.
   This differs from all of the above because you need to install a browser plugin. You “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” a site, “stumble” it by submitting a site, or “stumble” to browse the current entries. Stumbleupon was originally oriented towards promoting sites with visual content and appeal, but now has a considerable number of categories. Neil Patel provides a bit more depth about getting Stumbled.

As I noted above, these are the sites I use. Not all of them may be suitable for the niches you want to promote. If you’re looking for a more comphrensive list with niche sites, check out Andy Hagan’s list of social media sites that actually send traffic. He’s constantly updating the list.

You’ve tackled the relatively small task of devising an editorial calendar for your blog, and know where to find research sources. Now you need a good tool to compose articles with. Well if you spend any significant part of the day without Internet access, the Zoho Writer application now works offline. Type up your documents offline, then synchronize with your account when you have Internet access. What could be easier?

Well, that’s the idea, anyway. For now, the offline version only allows reading of documents, not writing. They’re getting to read/write offline, but it’ll be about another month. You will also need to install a browser plugin that works with IE 6+ and Firefox 1.5+ (including Mac).

I use ZohoWriter every day, but mostly for the word count feature, not for actual composition of an article. It can, however, substitute as an free alternative to Microsoft Word. And it exports to HTML format.

For documents, I prefer to use OpenOffice. For blog posts, I use an older version of the PFF (Performancing for Firefox) extension, now called ScribeFire). This PFF/ ScribeFire is incredible because you have the option of running it (1) in a Firefox tab, (2) in the bottom pane of your Firefox window, or (3) in a separate window. If you’re careful, you can run two instances. Just don’t edit the same file in two places or you’ll be crying.

Note that ScribeFire 1.4.2, released in early August, supports Firefox 3. However, one blogger claimed that it does not seem to post to WordPress blogs. I have not tested it yet as I have no plans to swith from the old PFF version. So if you’re running an older version of ScribeFire or PFF, you might want to do a bit of research before switching to a new version.

You have a plan for building your website‘s authority and have decided that you need linkbait. You’re either going to write it yourself or hire someone. But one piece of linkbait is not always as successful as another. Why? Well that’s what this article is about. Here are some common mistakes that you might commit in either writing or buying linkbait, which will reduce it’s value and effectiveness.

1. Not researching your niche.
   If you are planning a long-term linkbaiting campaign, you should know as much as you can about your niche. That allows you to think outside the box and write completely unexpected but successful linkbaits.
2. Using poor titles.
   If you follow Copyblogger at all, you know that the title of your articles can make or break their popularity. If you’re not good at titles, Lyndon at Cornwall SEO offers 200 killer headlines for your niche for a price that’s worth every cent. If you spend several hundred or thousands on the article, make sure there’s a good title to go with it. If you do it yourself, spend sufficient time doing so.
3. Not giving credit.
   If you “borrow” ideas that were clearly introduced on a given blog, you need to give credit by linking back. Don’t let poor research techniques hinder you.
4. Poor research process.
   If you plan to write linkbait long-term, use an efficient research and bookmarking process for storing URLs you plan to link to. Try whatever works for you, and don’t be afraid to change:
   1. Browser bookmarks.
   2. Social bookmarks.
   3. Text file.
   4. Mindmap.

   I use a combination of these, as my mood or requirements dictates.

5. Not deep-linking.
   Bloggers with no scruples or no understanding of copyright will republish your linkbait verbatim. So deep-link into your existing archived articles from within every linkbait. That way, you’ll at least get some backlinks.
6. Not linking back.
   Just writing a linkbait article is not sufficient. Link back to it from future articles on your blog. Vary the anchor text. Sometimes use the title of the bait; other times use relevant keywords/ keyphrases. This helps both your linkbait and your site gain some authority in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
7. Forgetting entertainment value.
   Provided your linkbait isn’t about a serious topic, you should consider writing to entertain readers. Injecting references to the pop culture of your region can be all that you need to achieve this.
8. Not using storytelling hooks.
   I learned a lot about writing and compelling readers when I spent three months writing nothing but short fiction and novellas. My best linkbaits (read highest Diggs and backlinks) were the ones where I applied storytelling hooks to compel readers through a massive list of items.
9. Ignoring content hooks.
   There are also different types of content hooks you can use, to make your linkbait more cohesive.
10. Forgetting your choices.
    Problogger lists twenty different types of linkbaiting techniques. You don’t always have to write lists.
11. Talking down to the reader.
    Never write as if you think people reading your articles (linkbait or otherwise) are stupid, or at least not as smart as you. Write for peers, always, in terms of tone and approach.
12. Rushing it.
    Trying to write a linkbait in a single sitting will drain you and you’ll grow to hate the work. Plan as many weeks ahead as you can. I was fortunate enough to have one client that assigned me three months of weekly work all at once. So I had lots of time to plan and accumulate references on a daily basis.
13. Poor formatting.
    Not all “linkbait” articles have to be lists, but all of them should be well-formatted for easy scanning. Use one or more of the following typography or visual elements to generate whitespace and break up text density:
    1. Sub-headings.
    2. Numbered lists. Use several, with sub headings, for longer lists.
    3. Bold text.
    4. Italicized text.
    5. Blockquotes.
    6. Images.
    7. Diagrams.
    8. Maps.
    9. Slideshows.
    10. Videos.
14. Link spamming.
    If you have a linkbait list of, say, 50 items, it’s probably fine to link out to 15-35 web pages elsewhere, plus 2-5 of your own archive pages, if appropriate. But if you start inserting lots of links to irrelevant sites that you (or your client) own, you’re asking for nasty Digg comments. Check out Smashing Magazine for other golden rules of linkbaiting.
15. Not doing SMM.
    Social media marketing, i.e., posting to a social news, voting or bookmarking site, is a necessary part of promoting linkbait. Some sites don’t like for you to submit your own articles, so respect that.
16. Not delivering the goods.
    Are you offering quality content? Are you getting angry comments that your linkbait sucks? Maybe it does. This could be due to several reasons:
    1. Promoted in the wrong category of a social media site.
    2. Having a really catchy linkbait title but not delivering what’s promised in the rest of the article.
    3. Having a really catchy title and description on a social media site but doing a poor job in the article.
    4. Poor or no references.
    5. Erroneous “facts”.
    6. Not spell-checking.
    7. Using poor grammar.
17. Not being first to submit.
    It’s a good idea to get someone you trust to submit the article to a social media site. That way, you can control the quality of the title and description. If someone you don’t know does it, they might do a poor job.
18. Not being first to comment.
    This isn’t absolutely necessary, unless you have a very controversial article. In that case, being the first to comment can set the tone for comments to follow. This is a tough issue to describe. You’ll have to judge for yourself.
19. Not hiring an SMM.
    If you plan to do a long-term linkbaiting campaign, you need someone with a lot of friends in their social media profile to do promote your linkbait. That increases the chances of success, if you have a good article. This goes back to #15 above, not doing SMM. Your hired SMM, even if only part-time, should be your primary story submitter. You should, however, change the submitter from time to time.
20. Not enough content balance.
    A blog full of only linkbait might get overwhelming for readers. Use a mix of regular articles and linkbait.
21. Publishing haphazardly.
    Linkbait articles are most effective when you’re publishing them at least once a week.
22. Forgetting to upgrade hosting.
    If you have a budgeting hosting, you’re just asking for trouble. Upgrade before you start publishing linkbait content, especially if you’ve gotten the hang of SMM traffic triggers.
23. Having thin skin.
    The more linkbait you publish and promote, the more likely you’ll get nasty, energy-draining comments, especially on Digg, and sometimes just from stray visitors who feel like making everyone else miserable. I’m not going to expound on the why of it, but if you have thick skin, you’ll get through to the value of social media traffic.

Blasphemy, I hear some of you saying. Linkbait, if promoted properly on social media sites, brings lots of traffic and, if you’re lucky, lots of links from other bloggers.

But it’s a hit and miss situation that sometimes ends up with overloaded web servers, cancelled hosting accounts, and even lots of nasty comments on Digg, if the article sucks, is poorly categorized, or both. This can be emotionally and/or financially draining, if you’re doing this long-term. A site consisting only of linkbait might eventually turn readers away.

Now, I’m not saying don’t linkbait. As a hired linkbaiter myself, I’ve seen the value of quality linkbait. (And really good ones are not easy to write, despite the sudden explosion of linkbaiters out there.)

But Pandia presents a comprehensive alternate link building plan [via Sphinn] based on a few simple principles. There’s also a really clever set of terms to describe certain types of content and services, and their temporal behaviors.

Consider this premise that Pandia puts forth: Quality content, such as a tutorial, that pulls X visitors per day over a year might actually pull more traffic than an average linkbait promoted on Digg. That is, a page pulling even 10-20 visitors per day, every day, might be far more effective on a holistic level than a linkbait.

Why? Because those 3,000+ visitors over a year might actually be more targeted than a sudden influx of social media visitors. Do you think you can write lots of good content that steadily pulls in 10-20 visitors per day? I’ve had a few CSS tutorials pull in regular traffic, comments, and links for a good year now. A gallery of simple fractal images on one website pulls steady traffic, thanks to Google Image Search and a few links from high PR websites.

On the other hand, good linkbait promoted well can and does pull in massive amounts of primary and secondary backlinks that supplement traffic for a long-time. And the links come early on, which has an effect of pulling future traffic and backlinks in a manner very similar to compound interest. My own feeling is that you want to build a website that has a balance of textual and visual content types.

If you’re just starting a new weblog, consider that not choosing effective blog categories can affect your search engine rankings. After two years of regular blogging, I’ve made a lot of mistakes re my categories for my oldest blogs. I’m now of the firm opinion that you have to think of each category archive page as a home page itself. You can build some of your site’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) authority through your category archives. Here are a few tips for creating worthwhile blog categories.

1. Be broad but descriptive.
   Categories should be broad rather than very specific, but should not be too general. Specificity will come from the keywords in your articles. Fragmenting category topics further means you’ll end up with too many categories at some point in your blog’s future. Picking good categories means knowing what your blog is really about.
2. Don’t be wordy.
   One or two words for a category name is best. You don’t want long sentences but you do want user-centric categories.
3. Minimize categories.
   Limit the number of categories, else you run the risk of having too few articles in each one. There’s no hard and fast rule, but I now try to limit a blog to no more than 15 – fewer if possible. Authority of category archives comes partly from the quantity of articles in each category.
4. Be conservative.
   Only create categories as you need them. If you strongly feel a new article needs a new category, then add a suitable category, keeping it broad enough to represent future articles. If you think that a category will only ever have one or two articles, then you need to rethink that category. Can it be incorporated with something else?
5. Build authority.
   Link to your category pages from within article text, on occasion, even with alternate anchor text. This can add SERPs authority to your category archives.
6. To multi-categorize or not.
   This is a controversial point. I always use 1-3 categories for every article I post in a blog, though there may be some justification in using one category per post.
7. Sub-categories are unnecessary.
   Some blog platforms allow you to create sub-categories under a parent category. This is unnecessary, and sometimes makes your navigation look awkward.
8. Use your blog platform.
   Tags are not categories. No need to use tagging from Technorati or other sites, unless your blog platform does not have categories. If it does not, you could use Technorati or del.icio.us tags (Blogger/ Blogpost-specific). Alternately, you could categorize manually.
9. Emphasize category volume.
   Most new visitors to a blog want to know what it’s about, and they often turn to the categories, hoping to get some idea of how many articles are in each. You can do this by displaying the number of posts and/or using a tag cloud.

Welcome to the third edition of the Small Business and Startups (CoSBaS #3). As many entries as possible have been including, based on my time to read through each. If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please give a link back as soon as you can. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with the opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking. Enjoy.

Featured Posts

Here are this week’s featured posts.

1. How to React to Criticism by Dr. Robert Karlsberg and Dr. Jane Adler of The Road to CEO. “I am human and I need to be loved/ just like everybody else does,” said Morrissey in his The Smiths song How Soon is Now? No wonder most of us react badly when we’re criticized. Who can blame us? But criticism can help us, say the good Doctors, and they present a strategy for how to benefit from it.
2. What Happens if Your Clients Don’t Pay? by James Mitchell of FocusMinded.com. Just yesterday, a blogger friend told me that one client isn’t responding to his messages and hasn’t paid their invoice. I suggested he publish their name on his blog, if they didn’t make any effort to pay within 30 days. James lists some other options that are available to you if you have a non-paying client.

Other Entries

Here are the remaining entries for this edition.

1. Finding The Right Information About Franchise Opportunities by Tom Stanley of Tom’s Franchise Information Blog.
2. How to Create Your Own Online Store in an Hour Or Less by Matthew Paulson of Finance Is Personal.
3. The Balance of a Leader by Michelle Cramer of GreatFX Small Business Tips.
4. How I Became a Millionaire While Working In My Pajamas by Millionaire Mommy of Millionaire Mommy Next Door.
5. Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men by Alvaro Fernandez of Brain Fitness Blog.
6. Startup Required Reading: Top 100 VC Bloggers by Sagar Satapathy of Bootstrapper.
7. The Business Blogging Toolset: 100 Resources for Entrepreneur-Writers by Sunny of Bootstrapper.
8. How to Write a Short Bio or “About Me” Page by Barbra Sundquist of Become a Certified Coach.
9. My Partner’s Not Doing Enough Work! by Warren Wong of Personal Development for INTJs.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Aug 5th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival. Go check out the other three blog carnivals that I am managing, in case there’s a fit for your article.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please. I am now deleting the entries of anyone who submits more than one per week. It’s up to you to choose one good entry, not me.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more.

Welcome to the second edition of the Small Business and Startups. As many entries as possible have been including, based on my time to read through each. If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please give a link back as soon as you can. Preference for subsequent entries is given to new bloggers (those not already selected in an edition) and those who have linked back to editions they’ve been in. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking.

Where provided, summaries of articles have been published here, though in future editions, I will try to provide my own summaries, when time permits. Enjoy.

1. Entrepreneurship 101: Is Entrepreneurship Right For You? by Daniel Sweet of Free Resume And Career Toolbox Blog. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everyone is capable of entrepreneurial success. It takes a certain kind of personality. Daniel has a new series of articles that may help you determine if entrepreneurship suits you. This one is the index, along with an introduction.
2. Get More Done with Activity Logs by Dr. Robert Karlsberg of The Road to CEO blog. Having trouble with your productivity? Dr. Karlsberg discusses how keeping activity logs can benefit you, and offers a PDF download of a sample log sheet.
3. 10 Reasons Why I Love Google by Jimson Lee of Speed Endurance. Bootstrappers and startups are always strapped for cash. And software can be very expensive. So how can you not love free software. Jimson lists ten web-based applications or services that Google offers for free. (I might be wrong, but I thought Google Apps Premier edition is only free for 30 days.)
4. Not So Smart After All by Mike Buckley of Mine Your Own Business. Mike offers an amusing story of why it’s important for businesses to maintain integrity.
5. 3 Huge Steps On How To Leap From The Security Of A Job To A Home Business by Cade Krueger of Small Business Opportunity. Not everyone finds it easy to go from a salaried job to a starting a business, and sometimes running it from home is more fearsome. Cade offers a substantial explanation of three steps that you can take to make the leap.
6. Planning Out a Short Term Project by Matt of Realigned Living. As the title suggests, Matt points out that planning isn’t just for big/ long-term projects.
7. There are Times When Features are Better Than Benefits by Jim Logan of Jim Logan. We typically market to consumers in terms of the benefits of a product or service. Jim suggests that sometimes it’s better to talk about features.
8. If At First You Don’t Succeed by Adnan of Entrepreneur Buzz. Despite the title, Adnan’s article is about being cautious about sharks when you start an online business. Although, if you don’t succeed the first time around… Well, you know.
9. 13 Things a Successful Entrepreneur Must Know & Take Action On by Edith Yeung of Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act. Edith discusses thirteen building blocks that entrepreneurs of any industry should take note of.
10. Advertising Jingles and Commercials – Radio & TV by Matt Hanson of Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog. Matt offers five rules to consider if you are planning on using running ad jingles on radio and TV.
11. How to Write a Headline and Grab Your Prospect by the Eyeballs! by Chris Tackett of Direct Marketing News. If your company needs to do direct marketing to gain customers, read Chris’ very detailed copywriting guidelines.
12. You Can Make More Working Less by Eric Hudin of Everyday Marketing Ideas. Eric offers up the radical idea that you can earn more by working less, provided you learn to be more efficient in your tasks.
13. 5 Distractions To The Nesting Entrepreneur by Ant of The Beef Jerky Blog. Ant cautions “nesting” entrepreneurs of five distractions that they may face. These are entrepreneurs that are still dipping a toe into the idea of going into business and haven’t fully committed.
14. How to Influence Others by Terry Dean of Integrity Business Blog. Terry offers six tips for positively influencing other people as part of your general business proceedings.

Notes
Here are some reasons for an article’s exclusion.

• Resubmitting the same article to a carnival. I keep all unpublished entries that meet the requirements and publish them when I can. If an article does not meet requirements, it gets deleted in my list. Not honoring this rule means permanent exclusion from this carnival as my time is limited and I don’t want to have to read it all over again.
• I’ve become fairly tolerant of the occasional typo or bad grammar, but if an article consistently shows poor grammar or spelling, it will not be included.
• Submitting articles where 90% of the content are quotations from someone else’s article.
• Articles you took from elsewhere, that someone else wrote and had published elsewhere.
• Articles about home-based businesses are okay, home-based jobs are not. There’s a distinction: having your own business, which this carnival is focused on.
• Not relevant or promoting services or an affiliate product.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more.

If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

If you haven’t heard of Yahoo! Pipes, you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful, multi-purpose Web 2.0 service that you should seriously consider for your blogging research and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) toolbox. Here are just seven reasons to do that.

1. Feed mashups.
   The fundamental purpose of Yahoo! Pipes appears to be the ability to take numerous RSS feeds from endless sources and mashup them up. This includes filtering (which doubles as search), sorting, and data transformation. Of course, since Pipes outputs results in RSS format, you can subscribe to the results of any Pipe. They have subscribe buttons for several feed readers, or you can copy the auto-generated RSS URL.
2. Data analysis.
   At the time of this writing, Pipes just released eight new modules, many of which allow transformation and/or analysis of input feed data. They’ll likely be adding more modules in the future, possibly until the point that Pipes’ operators rivals XSLT – a poorly supported, standard XML querying language. (RSS feeds are a form of XML – eXtensible Markup Language.)
3. Plug and play Web 2.0 logo components.
   Not only can you take the output of a Pipe and send it to a compatible Web 2.0 application, you can pull information into Pipes from numerous Web 2.0 services. There are both custom and generic modules to do this. Or you can simply take the output of a pipe and feed it to an HTML badging, to display a block of snippets on your website.
4. Visual interface.
   Pipe-building is done on an empty, visual canvas, with drag-and-drop blocks that you drag-and-connect up with “tubes”. Pipes is sort of the visual equivalent of XSLT, which requires learning a whole ‘nother language.
5. No need to be a programmer.
   Photographers that I know managed to learn Perl and PHP web programming. But with Pipes, there isn’t any regular programming. There is the visual equivalent of programming operations, but if you understand their functionality, you can learn to string the modules together to do what you need.
6. Complex applications.
   Multiple Pipes can be snapped together like blocks to build complex Web 2.0 mashups.
7. Resusable applications.
   Each Yahoo! Pipe has one of two modes that it can be in: published or unpublished (default). Once you publish a Pipe, someone else can use it, either just to run it, or they can clone it and tweak it to customize. You can also clone and tweak your own Pipes, even if they’re not published. Cloning saves a great deal of time for Pipes development.

Yahoo! Pipes is still in beta mode, so on occasion there’s quirky behavior, unresponsive servers, and changing modules. And yet, it is arguably one of the most powerful Web 2.0 services to date. It’s free, although you do need to be signed up for a Yahoo! Mail account.

Watch this blog for custom Pipes, as well as the occasional video screencast tutorial explaining how to to build a Pipe.

This is a roundup of some blog carnivals that Logo Design Works blog posts were recently accepted into.

1. 4th Arsenal of Goals & Plans Carnival published 11 Pros and cons of promoting your business online.
2. Make Money Blogging 101 – Jul 16/07 published Blog carnivals: an inexpensive way to promote your busines website.
3. Carnival of the Capitalists, Jul 16/07 published Blog carnivals: an inexpensive way to promote your busines website.
4. Carnival of Small Business Issues #11 published 11 Pros and cons of promoting your business online.

Keep in mind that this blog  also currently hosts the Carnival of Small Business and Startups. The rules (and the link to the submission form) are here. The first edition has been posted.

Linkbaiting – a term not everyone likes – is one facet of link building. There are several types of linkbait articles (lists, resources, tools, etc.), but all serve to improve your website.

With list-style linkbait, aka listbait, readers get some valuable (or fun) information and you might, if you bait well, induce some links back to your website. These links come from other bloggers who enjoyed your listbait. Here are seven elements of a good linkbait.

1. Scannable structure.
   Listbaits should be easy to scan. This makes information easy to absorb. They can be fun or informative or both, and are influenced by two main sources:
   1. Magazine list articles (25 Easy Barbeque Recipes, 12 Ways to Please Your Boss).
   2. David Letterman’s Top 10 lists.
2. Catchy title.
   A good title has to descriptive yet brief, and has to tell the potential reader the benefit. Instead of saying more, I’ll refer you to a master of titles/ headlines.
3. Brief intro.
   Lead into your list with a brief introductory paragraph that summarizes what the article offers. Visually speaking, the intro should take up less vertical space on the web page than the list.
4. Numbered bullets.
   Listbaits are lists, plain and simple. Make it convenient for your readers by numbering your list’s bullet items.
5. Subheading.
   Each bulllet should have a bolded word or phrase summarizing the bullet. The full effect is a list that is easy to scan and absorb.
6. Summary.
   Follow up your bullet list with a summary paragraph to wrap up the article. You can do any number of things with a summary:
   1. Remind the reader what the article was about.
   2. Point out anything missing.
   3. Offer references to additional reading.
7. References.
   Without hyperlinked references, all you have is a list. When possible, try to link to a relevant article for each bullet item in your list. Link to both your archived articles as well as articles at other websites and weblogs. Doing so serves multiple purposes:
   1. Tells the reader, even just subconsciously, that you took the time to find supporting articles for them to look over, should they wish to. If they’re bloggers, that might earn you a link back from them. On social media sites, good links in a listbait improve your chances of being voted up.
   2. Increases the chances that the authors of the articles you linked to will link back to you.
   3. Increases the chances that a search engine’s ranking algorithm will attribute a higher rank to your article because you have linked to relevant articles.

There is of course more to linkbaiting than just these seven elements, including using writing hooks, offering truly valuable information, promoting your articles and more. But you can start practicing with these seven elements.

Generally speaking, writing an article is more valuable to your readers on a long-term basis than writing a simple blog post. While some old-school web usability experts say that a business weblog is reduced in quality by having anything other than articles, many of us professional bloggers disagree. There is much value in topic summaries, as there are busy readers who enjoy the fact that you’ve “filtered” many discussions and provided the gist.

If you do summarize well and can add some sort of unique perspective or additional information – or tie together two or three discussions about a currently hot issue, you will have satisfied readers.

That said, even if you have produced an editorial calendar for the feature articles for your weblog, you still want to find timely references. Here’s a shortlist of resources I like to use to either generate blog post ideas or as reference sources for larger articles.

1. DailyHub.
   DailyHub has not officially launched at the time of this writing, and is still lacking many “social network” features. However, it is an article voting site similar to Digg, but focused on business topics. Note: because DailyHub is being upgraded, you may not be able to access it from time to time.
2. Del.icio.us.
   Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can store URLs you enjoyed or want to explore further. You don’t so much vote as “save” a bookmark, and you can befriend other members and they you.
3. Digg.
   Digg is a great source of hot topics, though the old-guard members have a very specific interest – mostly Apple Computer products, gaming, and Linux. That doesn’t mean this social media does not have breadth. Just be prepared for heated arguments, on occasion, in the comments section of some threads.
4. Google News + Alerts.
   Google News draws content from a selection of websites and weblogs Google has picked out. If you look carefully at the left hand navigation menu, you can see a link for News Alerts, or RSS/Atom for the web feed URL. First search for the topics that you are interested in, using standard search term notation. Then choose your delivery (Alerts or feed). News Alerts are delivered by email, feeds are subscribed to in your favorite feed reader.
5. Megite.
   Megite is fantastic for showing current discussion threads. Using a select list of weblogs, much like Google News does for websites, Megite displays a story headline, as well as links to articles elsewhere that either link to the main story or are related topically. If you’re stuck for what to write, Megite can often help you break your block.
6. Reddit.
   No disrespect intended, but Reddit is like a simplified Digg. And that’s a good thing, especially if you don’t want to wade through all the categories in Digg. Or don’t feel like reading the venomous comments that sometimes appear there.
7. Sphinn.
   Sphinn is brand new, as of this writing, and is modelled on social media voting sites like Digg. The difference is that Sphinn was launched by an SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/ Search Engine Marketing) firm, and keeps its topic set to that broad category, as well as some related topics. If you want to learn about online promotion and building a web presence – or have articles of that nature – this is the place to go.
8. Stumbleupon.
   Stumbleupon, recently purchased by eBay, is fairly unique in social media (to the best of my knowledge). Install a “stumble” button into your browser, and when you land on a page you really like and want to share, click the “I Like it!” button. Stumbleupon is said to also be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Check out this beginner’s guide [via Sphinn].
9. Techmeme.
   If there’s a significant difference between Megite and Techmeme, I haven’t spotted it. Techmeme is architected much the same in terms of main story link and related stories. On the off-chance that there’s a different story at Techmeme than Megite, it’s worth a look.
10. Yahoo! News.
    Yahoo! News is based on the same principle as Google News. The major difference is that Yahoo! doesn’t have an equivalent to Google Alerts by email. You can, however, subscribe to search results.

The list is by no means exhaustive and is only a starting point. Whether you use these sources for your blog posts or longer articles, remember to always give credit – in the form of a hyperlink – to an article that you quote or borrow heavily from.

Welcome to the first edition of the Small Business and Startups. As many entries as possible have been including, based on my time to read through each. Here are the first 20 entries. If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please give a link back as soon as you can. Preference for subsequent entries is given to new bloggers (those not already selected in an edition) and those who have linked back to editions they’ve been in. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking.

Where provided, summaries of articles have been published here, though in future editions, I will try to provide my own summaries. Enjoy.

1. How to Start an Online Store by Ant of The Beef Jerky Blog.
2. The Lawsuit Risks of Having a Website by Michelle Cramer of Great FX Small Business Tips. “In a lawsuit-happy world, just having a website, an essential part of today’s successful business, can result in a courtroom battle. This post lists some things to look out for.”
3. 20 Ways to Add Value to Your Products and Services by Terry Dean of Integrity Business Blog.
4. How to Gain a Big Advantage by Being Small by Mason Hipp of SmallFuel Marketing Blog. “An article that explores the various advantages small business owners have over bigger businesses.”
5. John Assaraf and Murray Smith Interview by Scott Allen of About Entrepreneurs. “John Assaraf (one of the stars of “The Secret”) and Murray Smith (of Indian Motorcycle fame) talk with About.com Entrepreneurs Guide Scott Allen about entrepreneurial passion, success mindset, learning from failure, Law of Attraction, changing the world. Audio and full transcript both included.”
6. Get More Web Site Traffic, Increase Web Site Conversion & Strategic Customer Acquisition by Jason Koeppe of Jason Koeppe’s Strategic Internet Marketing Blog.
7. 7 Phrases Successful People Would Never Say by Edith Yeung of Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act.
8. How a Failing Restaurant’s Rebound can Help You Build Your List by Leo Dimilo of Idiot Affiliate.
9. 10 Hot Blog Traffic Tips to try today! by Eve Lester of WordPress ReWorked.
10. 5 Best Ways to Keep Your Clients by Darrell A. Williams of Right-Hand-Man Virtual Assistant Services – BLOG.
11. Making a Great Impression With Customers by Krishna De of Biz Growth News.
12. How To Come Up With Good Business Ideas by Warren Wong of INTJ Personal Development.
13. Building a plan Part 4a: Get to know your team (New Hires) by Karl Goldfield of Coaching Sales Champions.
14. 6 Tips to Recovering From a Typo in Your Printed Sales Letter or Brochure by Jim Logan of BusinessLeaderCentral.com. “It’s a nightmare situation, one without explanation or excuse. You have a tight budget, little room for financial error, and somehow it happened. You spent the money to print 5000 sales letters or brochures and afterwards discovered a typo. After you kick yourself repeatedly, here’s what you can do.”
15. Discounts Abound for Small-Business Owners by George Courtney Jr of The Authentic Bartender Blog.
16. Business 101: Teaching Myself Entrepreneurship by Silicon Valley Blogger of The Digerati Life.
17. Create Your Treasure Map To Riches by Millionaire Mommy Next Door of Millionaire Mommy Next Door.
18. Find your Sweet Spot by Skip Shuda of The Cheap Revolution. Startup advice, free and cost-effective (cheap) resources and some deep thinking about technology entrepreneurs and their startups.
19. End-to-End Online Marketing by Chris Denny of Lead Optimize. Tighten up all aspects of your online marketing to turn your visitors into customers.
20. How to Make $100,000 a Year, $7 At a Time by CapForge of CapForge.

Note: Several of the submissions were good articles but they were about finding work-at-home jobs, which this carnival is not about. This carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success. There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more.

Other types of articles not included are those not relevant or promoting services or an affiliate product. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

You’ve decided that your company needs a website and have already setup a domain. Now you’re in the process of also setting up a weblog. Of course, even a small business weblog needs articles – more so than maybe your main website. If you want to provide your readers better quality articles and not just random posts, make your life easier by developing an editorial calendar. While editorial calendars live mostly in the print world, they can be greatly beneficial for a managing a long-term weblog.

What

Traditionally, an editorial calendar essential lists the topic/ theme for a given issue of a print publication. It’s simply a month by month breakdown of the scheduled themes. Each issue might be broken down further into sub-topics.

Why

In the print magazine world, an editorial calendar serves several primary purposes:

1. Editors can slot proposals toward specific issues and assign concrete deadlines. While a general content plan lists all the topics a publication might ever cover, the editorial calendar says, “August will be about Entrepreneurs Under 30.” Editors can then decide on feature topics and supporting topics for each issue.
2. Gives the ad sales teams a chance to presell pages to relevant advertisers and have ad copy ready to go on time.
3. Advertisers often will get a discount for buying in bulk and in advance, and the calendar helps them to decide whether to buy one month or six.
4. Freelance and staff writers can plan and research in advance, then propose an article to editors.

An additional benefit is cohesion of topics in a given issue for readers. Readers do like themes in magazine issues, even if they are not aware of it.

Who

Typically, the editorial calendar is determined by the Editor in Chief (EIC), Managing Editor or Assistant Editor. Sometimes, though, the Publisher will dictate the general themes for a given year or two.

Where

The editorial calendar is mostly used by magazines, though some daily and weekly newspapers might use them. Department-wise, both the editorial and ad sales teams will be aware of the schedule. For the online world, you can use editorial calendars for websites, weblogs, linkbait, ebooks, viral campaigns and more.

When

Publications vary, but editorial calendars are often defined for a twelve-month period – normally from January to December, or possibly something resembling a publication’s fiscal year.

How

How do you develop an editorial calendar for a weblog? Here is a suggested step-by-step process:

1. Choose your weblog’s overall topic.
2. Brainstorm all the subtopics that you will want to cover over time. You can even use a mindmap to brainstorm.
3. Produce a list of tenative article titles. Whether you produce the articles or hire a blogger, the list will remind you of general areas of interest.
4. Choose a schedule for feature articles. Regular blog posts don’t really have to be schedule, unless you want to run weekly themes and have enough material to do so.

Ultimately, for a weblog, an editorial calendar simply serves as a guideline for research and writing of feature articles and supporting articles. When you know what’s coming up, is much easier to research. You can change the schedule if you like, or produce editorial calendars spanning a single month instead of a year – ahead of time of course.

You’ve decided that your business website should have a blog. You’ve never blogged before, or have only had a personal blog on a hosted service such as Blogspot. Here are a few things you shouldn’t do, or think twice about before doing.

1. Post paid reviews.
If you are a business selling products, it just seems cheap to be pimping yourself out for someone else’s products. Feel free to mention other products, if they’re relevant to your blog’s topic set. Also, if your business is small (number of employees), it’s a matter of personal preference whether or not to use an Amazon affiliate code if you occasionally mention a book you highly recommend.

2. Run advertising.
Okay, let’s qualify that. Many webware (web application) sites that give away free access often have Google AdSense ads present. That’s their sole source of income, until they get purchased or find VC capital. Small businesses that sell their other companies’ products also occasionally have advertising, both graphic and pay-per-click. But if you are selling only your own products, think twice about publishing ads. Companies selling services, on the other hand, seem to be able to get away with sometimes selling ads. Ultimately, it’s a personl decision.

3. Fake your comments.
Don’t be like Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who repeatedly insulted a competitor in web forums under the pseudonym “Rahodeb”. This sort of thing applies to your business blog as well. Coach employees to also be transparent about their commenting, if they are representing you.

4. Get angry at insulting comments.
You can decide to turn off comments and allow only trackbacks, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be subject to insults. The Internet has become the great leveller of society in many ways, and that means that people free to be insulting online at anything they don’t agree with – something they might never do in person. You are not going to change that. Be diplomatic in your responses, or hire a professional writer to do the blogging for you.

5. Skip attribution.
The blogosphere is all about forming relationships. That means that if you are borrowing a concept or idea from someone, you should give them attribution by linking back to a specific URL on their site. Even if you came up with something on your own, it doesn’t hurt to pick a couple of articles on other sites where they’ve discussed something similar recently. Linking out is actually a good idea. In a similar vein, don’t steal content. It’s just wrong in so many ways.

This blog’s emphasis to date has been on entrepreneurship and small business. Discussion of the needs of business startups is something we are are also including in our topic categories. All three share a lot of related issues, being essentially at an early stage that could lead to becoming a corporation. As such, to promote relevant articles, we are launching the Carnival of Small Business and Startups.

The type of articles accepted have anything to do with small business, entrepreneurship, and startups. There’s also a “business travel” category, if you have relevant articles. The rules are simple:

1. One article per edition. We’ll do our best to include as many entries in each edition as possible and will only refuse an entry for the following reasons:
   • Non-English (sorry).
   • A scraped entry (i.e., passing off someone else’s work as your own).
   • Irrelevant to the topics.
   • Multiple submissions in a single edition.
   • Refusal to link to a previous edition that you already appeared in. Linking back helps promote the carnival, and its value will be understood if you decide to host the carnival in the future.
2. Expected frequency: weekly.
3. Hosting: The carnival will be hosted here but will be open to other hosts 1-2 times per month starting in late August.

The first edition will be posted on Mon July 23rd. The deadline is Fri July 20th, 11:00 pm EST. You can use the BlogCarnival submission form to enter. Please use a real email address as we may ask for a confirmation of your entry, and other hosts may do so as well.

A good email client is a critical part of your toolkit if you’re planning to work online or establish any sort of web presence for your online or offline business. But then, you probably already know that. If you’re a fan of GMail (Google Mail), or just getting started, you may want to subscribe to their new official Gmail blog.

At this writing, there’s only their intro post, but no doubt it’ll spill all kinds of great tips for one of the best web-based email systems available. Veteran web-based email clients from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and others now have a spiffier AJAX-based interface, though GMail is still superior in many ways.

Some Gmail features

Google Mail has a few quirks that need fixing, such as the inability to open email messages in new browser windows/ tabs. However, there are many great features that make up for it:

1. Multi-acount integration.
   Download email from other email account providers. You can leave a copy at the source or delete. The email can be redirected to a specific folder in your GMail account, or stuffed in the inbox.
2. Message threads.This is more old-school than new. Many old pre-Internet mail systems had this feature. If you start a “conversation” and your recipients respond, all of the messages are clustered in a “conversation thread” for easy access. This can be both a boon and a burden, depending on how you use email. For example, if you want to send someone an email but on a new topic unrelated to other discussions, you should start a new thread. Just create a fresh email message instead of lazily responding to their last message to you.
3. Folder redirection.
   Need to redirect email from one or more sources into special folders automatically? GMail makes it incredibly simple. I use this feature to auto-redirect newsletter subscriptions into a folder that I can look over later. Just create a “filter rule”, state any senders addresses, and the folder to redirect to.
4. Wildcard account names.Want to sign up for various newsletters but are wondering if they’re honoring privacy? Use a wildcard name to sign up. (In fact, you can use a unique email address for each signup and create a redirection filter for each, as well.) If you start to receive unexpected email, you’ll be able to track which site has given your email address away. The way it works is to augment your existing Gmail address. So if that’s yourname@gmail.com, and if you want to sign up at, say, greatnewsletters.org, you could use something like yourname+gnl.org@gmail.com in the signup form. The text after the “+” is arbitrary, but make it unique for that signup. The caveat is that some web signup forms may either limit the number of characters in your email address or not be able to parse the plus sign. So this feature isn’t always useful. There are other uses of the wildcard. Consider visiting Amit Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration, which has many great articles on GMail and other technologies.
5. Storage space.
   GMail gives you over 2Gb of message space, which can act as an online backup disk, provided you don’t exceed your Internet provider’s monthly bandwidth. The amount of space actually keeps increasing over time, a feature that a number of other webmail services are also offering. This can be used as a handy way to transfer files between two computers, without having to open up sharing on your hard drives. Just create an email message, attach the file (up to 20 Mb is the official word), then save the message as a draft. Then log into GMail on the other computer, open up the draft, and save the attachment to that computer’s hard disk. The alternative is to
   • (a) use a local network,
     (b) burn a CD-Rom,
     (c) use the file sharing feature on a chat client such as Google Talk or Skype, or
     (d) some other file-sharing service.
6. Multiple accounts.
   Is 2+ Gb not enough for you? You can just sign up for another GMail account. Provided you’re not abusing the usage, Google probably will not mind.
7. Better spam filtering.
   While the quantity of spam being sent to my GMail account is increasing rapidly, the numbers ending up in my inbox instead of the spam folder is decreasing. I can’t say the same about Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, unfortunately. And the “webmail” installation that comes with many budget Internet hosting plans doesn’t seem to trap any spam whatsoever. Believe it or not, GMail does a better job of filtering the spam sent to my Yahoo email address, which I manage from GMail, than Yahoo Mail does.
8. WYSIWYG editor.
   Okay, this isn’t an exclusive, though I find working with GMail’s message editor very much like editing a web page in “view” mode. It’s easy to use and compatible with email clients that can handle HTML.
9. Integration with web services.
   Google has been integrating GMail with their other web-based “Office” software. If you receive, say, an MS-Word email attachment, you can choose to view it either in
   • (a) MS-Word,
     (b) as HTML in a browser window/ tab, or
     (c) as a Google Docs document in a browser/ tab.

   The same goes for PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, and no doubt more in the future.

10. Integrated chat client.
    GTalk is the in-client version of Google Talk for GMail. If you have GTalk turned on in your GMail settings, you can actually chat from within GMail to one of your contacts. Some people don’t like the tiny chat window, and only people with GMail accounts can participate (to the best of my knowledge).
11. Integration with MS Outlook.
    If you ultimately prefer a desktop email client such as MS Outlook, which is well-integrated with many other productivity packages, you can access GMail from Outlook (and other destkop clients). However, you lose out on GMail web client-specific features.

There are loads of other features, including all sorts of keyboard shortcuts for power users. Some drawbacks:

1. A message cannot be opened in a separate browser window/ tab.
2. GMail’s rapid popularity has resulted in mail distribution delays of several hours at times.

Aside from these drawbacks, the key thing for business owners to note is that even if you
have an official business email address that uses your website‘s domain name, you can integrate it with a GMail account and manage it from there.