Gravity Forms Vs Formidable: Some Points to Consider

In this article you can see a detailed review about gravity forms and formidable pro plugins for WordPress blogs. If you are about to make a purchase of any one of these plugin to satisfy the form management process of your blog then I suggest you to read this review.

Formidable pro is a dead simple form processing plugins to build any forms in minutes. It basically work with drag and drop features so no coding skills needed, just drag and drop the elements you need and your form is ready for use. It restricts edit features for logged in users and display the completed version for the users and at the backside you can make changes the forms.

Install plugins like NextGen gallery, Flash video player etc. to enhance the performance of the formidable pro plugin. Integration of the plugin is by applying short codes of the appropriate forms.

It allows users to create posts, pages, create custom pages with custom post types, display collected data with sleek graphical reports and also allows you to manage the complete front end of your blog. And the most exciting features of this plugin are it comes with 30 days money back guarantee with life time updates.

Now it's time to see review about gravity forms, the mostly used and trusted plugin for complete form management process of your blog. According to a recent survey, gravity form is used by 60% of bloggers and website owners to manage their blog.

It is available with variety of options like form builders, form fields, conditional logic, order forms, entry managements, notification features, customizations, styles and layouts. And also it supports multiple payment gateways like authorize.net, PayPal to process secure payments between users and company.

If you think the basic version is lagging in some aspects then you can install tiny addons that works well with this plugin which enhances the all over performance of the plugin.

They also have a separate support forms that will answer the queries of the users regarding installations and issue fix. The price is more affordable than formidable pro plugins, gravity forms is available in three licenses: Developer, business and personal.

Personal license is suitable for managing single blogs with limited number of features.

Business plan can be used for unlimited number of sites and can able to create unlimited forms and entries.

Developer plans has no limit they can get full advantage of the plugin and get priority support from gravity forms team.

Hope the given review will be helpful for you to choose the best fit for your business.

A freelance blogger and a passionate social media marketer, who is currently working on the site Gravity forms discount code 2012 where you can buy gravity forms at 40% off and get detail information about gravity forms tutorials.

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How to Start a Blog

If you have not noticed the internet is probably hotter compared to the hottest Hollywood "It Girl". Millions of people worldwide use the internet for a number of reasons; work, school, research, communication - name it, the internet does the job. A generation of "netizens" or citizens of the net have created a world of cyberspace where anyone and everyone can do anything at any given time. If there is one thing that the internet has made possible - it is for people to get themselves heard online. There's social networking to connect with friends, online videos to promote one's self and of course, blogging for people who love to write.

Blogging has redefined itself throughout the years and bloggers worldwide have also evolved into a different class online. In a nutshell blogging is basically writing about anything online likened to writing a journal or a diary. So, what are the steps to follow on how to start a blog? There are a million tips online that could teach you how to start a blog but there are simple ways of doing so.

Find your Blogger identity.

To put it simply, you have to find your niche. "What kind of blogger do you want to be?" is an important question that you need to ask before starting a blog. There are different kinds of bloggers online and they talk about almost any topic known to man; bloggers who talk about fashion, technology, sports, music, movies, food, traveling or just about their day-to-day lives. A variety of writers found their niche by writing what they love and what they are interested in and you can too.

If there is one thing that stops people from pushing through with starting a blog it is the fear of what if it won't be interesting enough for people to read. Do not over think and over analyze. Just write what you love and people will love it too.

Choose a Blog Platform

After deciding on what kind of blog you want to put up, choose your blog platform that will host your blog site. There are a number of sites that offer free hosting like Blogger, WordPress, or Tumblr these are only to name a few. These blog hosting sites allow you to have a blog for free and sometimes would even assist you on how to start a blog. These blog hosting sites even let you store the photographs that you want to include in your posts.

Choose the right blog hosting site that will suit your needs but if you have no idea, you can always read reviews online and see what people think about these sites.

The Name Game

In the blogging world, your name is your identity. Other bloggers will identify and associate you with that name. You have to think of your name as a brand, in the long run when your blog will have more loyal readers and followers they will promote you to other bloggers with that name. Make sure that name is unique and represents who you really are or what your blog is about. You can go the mysterious route, the cutesy names or be a no nonsense blogger using simply your name.

Get yourself out there

Depending on whether you write about a specific topic or you talk about personal stuff the main reason you blog is for sharing and being heard. Promote your blog to readers through social networking, post up links of your new posts. Eventually word will get out of about a new blog until you hit your target audience. And, in the long run the more your readership will expand you may even earn from it.

Blogging is open to anyone who wants to write, it doesn't matter if you are a professional writer or you simply write to express yourself, just take the step to begin your blogging journey.

Shantelle Golding is an Expert Internet Network Marketer."Learn How To Make $1,000 a day whilst Quickly And Easily EXPLODING Your Network Marketing Organization Without EVER Buying a Single Lead?"==> http://www.moneythenewway.com/

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Craigslist Strategy To Explode Your Online Business

I have embarked on an all out, massive effort, to market my online business over the next 90 days. For a lack of better terms, I call my plan the, "The 90 Day Free Marketing Challenge." One of the components of this plan is to promote my product with the use of free classified ads. Without question, the most well-known free classified site on the internet is: Craigslist. This article is to teach the reader about Craigslist and how to properly use this type of advertising platform.

Craigslist has a global Alexa Ranking of 39. Likewise, in the United States, Craigslist has a ranking of 9. The site's users are mostly Caucasian, and they tend to be childless women that earn over $30,000 per year. Why is this important? It's important because when you place advertisements on the site, you need to know your audience. In the case of Craigslist, you certainly don't want to place an image ad that is directed toward men. You would be much better off to design an advertisement that is directed toward the needs of the audience... in this case women.

Craigslist is a running list of advertisements. If you post your ad at 7:00am, as other advertisements get posted throughout the day, that 7:00am ad will drop to the bottom of the day's list. In order to be effective with your marketing campaign, you not only have to target the right audience, but you have to place your ads at the right time of the day. It won't do any good to place an ad, if no one looks at it. The first day you place your ad should give you the best number of leads. Day two leads will probably drop to half of day 1, and by the third day, your ad will all but completely disappear.

So, what is the strategy? I have found the best time of day to place my ads is around 6:00am to 7:00am. You want to have your ad up and running no later than 8:00am. I'm assuming that people get to work (or they're at home getting ready for work), turn on their computer, and look around on Craigslist before the day gets going. There is no question the 8:00am time is your rush hour. If you place an ad at 10:00am, it will be completely worthless. The next block of time that is meaningful is between the hours of 4:00pm to 7:00pm. People are ending their day and have a few minutes between activities to mess around on the internet. Once again, if you miss this block of time, you might as well wait until the next morning.

One ad per day on Craigslist will not get it done. In my opinion, you need to be placing 6-10 ads every single day to make a difference. It is important to note, that before you start placing ads, you will want to read up on the Craigslist Rules and Regulations. If you break the rules, they will most certainly shut down your account. Also, you want to make sure you place your ads in your local area. If you live in Chicago, don't try and place your ad in the Miami market. Craigslist does not like that!

Ghosting is a problem for many advertisers on Craigslist. What is ghosting? Ghosting happens when you place your ad, you get an email response from Craigslist that says everything looks wonderful and your ad is live. However, when you go to the Craigslist website and look for your ad... it's not listed. This means your ad is being ghosted. Ghosting can occur due to several reasons. To prevent this issue from happening, make sure you read up on all of the Craigslist rules. This will help with posting ads that actually go "live."

Renewing your ads with Craigslist is the most powerful strategy they offer. After three days of being posted, you have the option to "renew" your ad. With one click of the button, your ad will immediately jump to the top of the list. This is really powerful stuff. For example, if you have 10 ads that are live, and you forget to post for a few days, you can go back to the system and renew all 10 ads. All of a sudden, with a very limited amount of effort, you have multiple ads running (at the top of the list) in different cities. This procedure can generate a huge amount of leads for your business.

Craigslist can be an awesome way to promote your online business. I strongly encourage the reader to explore this strategy.

For more information on how to post on Craigslist, as well as to receive our in-depth Craigslist posting strategies, please visit our website at: http://www.newbiemarketing.us/

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Guest Blogging For Enhancement of Web Traffic

Guest blogging is a method adopted by bloggers for increasing visit of more audiences to their blogs. For this, they write posts for publishing on the blogs of other bloggers. As a blogger, you may write a post for appearing on the blog of another blogger. Alternatively, another blogger may write a post for appearing on your blog.

Guest Blogging is a strategic initiative for getting advantages by penetrating into the domain someone else. It therefore requires a lot of home work to be carried out. Your post must make a two-way effort of benefiting the host blog and at the same time, and reaping the benefit for your own business.

Besides strengthening your business relationship with an accomplished publisher, Guest Blogging may benefit you in any of the following ways-

Being in the content marketing, you may be well-versed with your topic but have no independent identity of your as such. You are a nondescript as far as content market is concerned but guest blogging may make you acquainted with your prospective clients along with some authority. You need to submit maximum contents within the shortest time.
Adding more traffic to your site does not necessarily draw more audience because traffic can be bought through pay-per-click or alternative means of advertisement. But traffic generated from a guest blog yield you a group of audience that is curious to know what you say. This creates an opportunity for you to convert them for a long-term business relationship.
Guest blogging builds up the network of your publisher by enlarging their connectivity with accomplished publishers. If you establish a good rapport with your parent blogger, you may succeed in getting a tweet or a link from him that would take you a long way towards getting an independent identity in the content market.
Guest Posting enables you to get a relevant, natural link by the use of anchor text of your choice.

The following are the tips that may interest you

Before submitting your post on another person's blog, get information about the contents and audiences of that blog and their comment about the blog.
Make a convincing approach to the other blogger with regard to your credibility and your strong points why the guest blogger's audience would like to read what you write.
Provide latest statistics about your blog with regard to unique visitors month wise supported by your rankings made by Google, Alexa and Technorati.
Instead of buttressing the other blogger with undue pampering, present yourself with facts and figures in an honest and straightforward manner. Value for the other person's time. Avoid furnishing flowering data about yourself.
Make the other blogger realize that you are well-versed with the blogging activities and that your contents will be unique and will not pose any copyright problem for him.
Convince the other blogger that your contents will be coherent and compelling, providing links to your blogs and samples of online writing.

Devjeet K Singh is a professional writers, Internet Marketer and lover of his family. He has written multiple articles on Blogging Tips and blog promotion methods on his SEO blog.

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Facts To Be Known About Blogging

The term 'Blog' is the shortened name of Web Log. It is thus a website and comprises text, hypertext, images and links to other web pages. The act of making addition of articles to the existing blog is termed 'Blogging'. Individual articles so posted are termed blog posts, posts or entries. One who posts these entries is called a 'blogger'. These postings are arranged in reverse chronological order; the latest being featured first. The concept of blog emerged in late 1990, coinciding with web publishing tools such as HTML and FTP. Blogs usually cover certain specific areas such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Other blogs may present link to other types of links. There may be yet other blogs dealing with political activities, personal experiences of the author.

Most of the good quality blogs have provision for interaction, wherein visitors are allowed to make their own comments and exchange message through GUI widgets on the blogs. The objective of blogging is not only to make contents for posting onto their respective blogs, but they adopt it as a medium for establishing and maintaining social relationship. There are a number of ways in which blogging is utilized such as remarks and views on specific topics, personal diaries, and brand advertisement of a company. Blogs have certain common features such as a main content area, with articles arranged chronologically, an archive of earlier files, a way for visitors to leave their comments, a list of links connected to other sites, called blogroll and feeds such as RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Content is the principal constituent of a web site and needs to be up-dated with the latest information, on regular basis for making it worth visiting. The information may be a catalog of products presented in a retail site. It may be about campuses, curriculum and faculty presented in a university site. You may find a number of observations, reviews or comments if it is a personal blog. Content consist of articles written by authors, composed in a web-based interface that is built into the blogging system. Next to 'content' come the 'comments' that the visitors to the sites are allowed to leave on the blogs. Through pingbacks or trackbacks, one blogger can leave comments on another blog without visiting it and also can keep other blogger informed as and when they cite any article from other site into their own.

There are different platform for blogging like "Wordpress", "Blogger", "Joomla", "Drupal" etc. Other terminologies you need to know about are Archives, Feeds, Blogrolls, Syndication, Trackbacks and Pingbacks. Monthly or Yearly archives keeps track of articles on site. A software 'Feed readers' provides automatic access to a site looking for new content and thereafter, post updates about the new content to other site. Blogroll is list showing links to webpages that may be of interest, often coming in a side bar. A feed is a content publication readable by a machine, usually XML. Syndication feeds informs new posts in blogs. Trackback facilitates notification between websites and Pingbacks provides solutions to some problems found with trackbacks.

Devjeet K Singh is a professional writers, Internet Marketer and lover of his family. He has written multiple articles on Blogging Tips and blog promotion at his SEO blog.

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Why Search Engline Optimization is Important?

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of fine-tuning a website so that users and search engines can find it easily on the World Wide Web. Not only access it easily but also find it attractive, fast, and easy to navigate. Such an improvement results in a website with high ranking in search engine result pages or SERPs, which is something every website owner or online publisher wants to achieve. Many proven SEO techniques have been made available to general public and experts of this field. Although the basic steps are easy to implement, once the process is started you find that it is an ongoing system that requires regular commitment.

There is no use of an online business if the users are unable to find it. Potential customers can only approach your website if it is listed in online directories and indexed by popular search engines. This is one aspect of SEO, which makes it an integral part of any business that has its presence on the internet. Even if you launch an extensive advertising campaign, the traffic might still be very low. This is because those advertisements are geared towards your current customers but do nothing to attract new customers from around the globe.

People find it easy to search on the internet instead of rummaging around a newspaper or listening to a radio broadcast to get what they're looking for. Online search engines also give highly relevant results based on the keyword we type in the search box. This way you can locate a local business very easily, note down its address and telephone number and even find directions to reach its office. That is why optimizing your business website for search engines is important for the success of your business.

Google and other search engines have bots that crawl the web to find new websites every day and index them automatically. Before any search engine has a chance to discover your website, you should make sure it includes all the necessary information for the bots to understand, such as what the site is all about and what type of products it sells, etc.

Some websites are very professionally made, include impressive graphics and video tutorials, but they are still very difficult to find on the internet. People usually see the first ten results given by a search engine and if your website is not listed in these results it is likely to be ignored by your potential customers. And this is what you should spend your money on, instead of hiring graphics experts and complex coding specialists. This is because even if your site is not very attractive visually but it is easily accessible by the users, you have achieved 90% of your objective!

Saif Ullah Butt is SEO consultant and have been giving SEO services from many years, You can catch him at http://www.saifullahbutt.com/

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Is Your Blogging Useful To Others?

Does your blogging have a 'noble' purpose such as focusing on helping other people or are you intent on simply making sales! Now there is nothing wrong with operating an internet marketing blog but you'll find much more success if actually helping other people is part of your strategy! It all comes down to traffic and frankly if you all you focus on is making sales, your blog will not be much of an attraction!

Here are 3 simple strategies you can use when writing content for your internet marketing blog that should help boost traffic along with your income!

Teach

Although internet marketing blogs are operated with the intention of making money never forget it is your content that attracts people! The key to getting more traffic, which of course translates into making sales is to offer information readers find useful! By teaching or educating others about something they already have an interest in, you stand a much better chance of getting visitors to your site! Helping other people is ALWAYS the best way to get the attention and earn the trust and respect of visitors! Offering this information freely as is the case when posted on a blog is a very effective way to increase traffic!

Deliver A Message

Supporting a cause or purpose be it political, personal or even religious is another popular tact you can take when blogging! Once again you're helping other people by keeping them informed about an interest they have while even giving them a forum in which they can exchange thoughts with others!

Watchdog

Tracking and reporting new developments as they may occur within a particular niche or industry is very popular with readers! This strategy like the 2 previous ones mentioned are all aimed at getting interested readers to land on your site! Now when running an internet marketing blog, once you have built a respectable list of subscribers or list members, you simply make product or service offers! In every case you need to always be mindful that what you offer is relevant to the interest of these people and the niche you're active within!

Your blogging needs to focus more on helping other people than simply making sales if you want to attract a steady flow of visitors! Although the underlying intent of having an internet marketing blog is to earn an income, you must first establish yourself as some type of useful resource to do so! Quite simply if you compose content with the intent of helping other people, making sales will be much easier for you to do! The 3 strategies reviewed here today are simple approaches you can use when composing any new updates that will tend to attract more people to your platform! Once you have the traffic flowing and become better known as a resource for visitors, making sales will then become much easier!

TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.
For more tips to make your blogging more purposeful thus bringing you more traffic and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques for your online marketing needs simply visit: http://blogbrawn.com/

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Use Pingler to Maximize Your Blog's Exposure

Why Use Pingler?
Many of you out there have heard about Pingler, and the amazing benefits it can offer. But before investing any money into yet another add-on, let's look at what Pingler has to offer and why you might, as an internet marketer, would benefit from using the product. Pingler is a web based service that allows Internet marketers the ability to get their blog pinged. The goal of this service is to provide a dependable way for marketers to get their sites pinged.

What is "Pingler" Anyways?
A little background on Pinging: In blogging, a ping is a mechanism by which a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. A signal is sent to one or more "ping servers" which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. The technology was first October 2001 and has had such a profound and powerful impact on blog rankings that today, most blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

So, for example, if you have a blog on the Empower Network, your Word press back office has already been pre-set for you to ping a list of servers automatically, each time you post a blog. The benefit of this is that you would get your whole site indexed faster, get new pages indexed, and start ranking for your search terms faster. Pingler is a service that helps you automate this process rather than go through a each aggregator site one by one and submit your RSS feed.

Pinging is a very useful tool and should be used to maximize a blog's exposure. Leveraging Pingler to ping your blog is an excellent source of building link popularity while gaining global exposure to your blog. This will help you get more traffic, more visitors, and listed in the search engines faster.

How do I Use Pingler?
It is not difficult to ping your blog. My two favorite sites, also known across the industry as the better ones are:Ping-o-Matic and Pingler. You can enter manually your blog URL and name, then, check all of the services that you want to know about your blog. I would recommend checking "all", more is better.

Can I Automate Pingler?
Absolutely! For a small membership fee, Pingler can get up to 25 of your sites pinged automatically.

In other words, for $2.99/month, You can set up this process in Pingler for up to 25 websites. You can then automate it so that Pingler automatically pings your site every 2-3 days. This will enable you to get your site indexed faster, start working on building links, and receive traffic faster.

Why Pay a monthly Fee if I can Ping with Ping-o-Matic or with Pingler for Free?

The huge benefit here is that for a minimal fee ($2.99/month), you would not have to manually go through this process every time you update contents on your blog, twitter account, Face book account, etc... Pingler would do that for you all at once. So serious time saving is associated with the upgraded account option.

Also, it is important to know that many pinging sites do not follow links. For that reason alone, it would be well worth it to the paid version of Pingler subscribe to this service. The paid version er allows you to gain back links for search engine benefits. Subscribing to the automated service is a good investment if your main goal is to get your pages indexed faster and your sites ranking as quickly as possible. As a subscriber, Pingler will list your site's live link on its pages. Although the links are listed as "no follow" and cannot be considered as back links, the Pingler community does add value for visibility purposes. Community users can see your site and will follow your links.

Anything to be on the Lookout for while Using Pingler?
As a whole, Pingler is an easy and effective tool in getting your blog or site indexed and getting increased traffic to your URL. The majority of reviews are positive and most subscribed users find significant added value to paying the additional $2.99/month premium (starting package). For greater needs, Pingler offers expanded packages for a high monthly fee (obviously... ). Of course, using the free version and pinging manually is always an option to end users. Just be aware that is not without faults. The success rate to get pinged is not 100% guaranteed.

However, the general consensus on Pingler is that most users find that most pings to sites go through and sometimes even generate backlinks from the pinging sites. Obviously, the biggest benefit from using the paid subscription to Pingler is the time you will save...

Yours in Success,

Karine

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Top 5 Tips to Increase Visitors on Your Blog

The world of blogs is very busy and it is also tremendously huge with more than one hundred million blogs and this figure is increasing every minute. So, how do you grab the interests of the visitors to your blog? Well that's a pretty decent question that could arise in every blogger's mind. Following are very useful tips that will surely help you in attracting the traffic to your blog.

1. Write Regularly & Write Well - The first and most important step to increase the visitors on your blog is persistently updating your blog with the top quality and useful content. The content of your blog is the key element that has the ability to tempt visitors coming back for more valuable information. It is essential to make sure that your blog posts are interesting and also try to make them reliable and loyal to the audience. If you want to increase the chances of getting caught by the search engines then post frequently.

2. Use the Power of Conversations - A very simple but essential and effective method to increase the visitors of your website is "commenting". First of all respond to the comments which are left on your blog in a positive way and then draw them into an unbiased two way conversation. This technique will easily increase the loyalty of the reader or visitor.

The second method regarding to commenting is, leave some comments on the posts of the other blogs in order to generate new traffic. It is important to make sure that you must post the working URL of your blog along with your comment. This way you can create a worthwhile back link to your own blog.

3. Use Various SEO Techniques - SEO is a very vast subject and thousands of books have been written on it but do not worry, you would not have to read all these books. All you have to do is understand and learn the basic search engine optimization techniques. These techniques are very helpful if you want to find your blog in the search engine results. Place keywords in the right places of your posts and also try to include appropriate keywords.

4. Build Quality Back links - The quality back links are vital for every blog but remember only the quality back links. They are very effective in attracting the audience to your blog instantly. But it's very important to be extremely cautious about them, because a cheap back link can badly hurt the rankings of your blog on the search engine instead of improving it. Always try to build some genuine and quality back links with a decent search engine rank and never ever purchase cheap packages like "10,000 back links just for $20".

5. Discuss Latest and Hot Trends - If you want to get the good favor of major search engines then talk about the hot topics because Google and all other major search engines would love to see the up-to-date and fresh content.

George is SEO consultant and have been giving SEO services from many years, You can catch him at http://www.saifullahbutt.com/

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6 Reasons to Start a Business Blog

There are all sorts of reasons you may have for not blogging.

- You are busy.
- You don't like to write.
- You don't know what to say.
- You tried that and no one ever read it.

When was the last time you considered all the reasons your business should have a blog? Here are the top 6 reasons to start and stick with blogging:

1. Forms the Core of Content Marketing - Are you interested in practically free marketing for your business? Of course you are! With just a little time and effort you can attract new leads to your business. Content marketing gives away valuable information to consumers. By doing this on your blog, you build your reputation as a thought leader in your industry. People come to trust your advice, and when they are ready to buy, they buy from the business and people they already trust.

2. Improves SEO - Search engine optimization may seem like a difficult or overwhelming task. But what it really comes down to is creating good, relevant, and up-to-date content that readers want to read. One of the best ways to do this is by consistently blogging. With all that fresh, optimized, information-focused (rather than product focused) content on your site - search engines are bound to love you.

3. Personalizes Your Business - Take this opportunity to put a face on your business. Rather than blogging from a stiff, corporate prospective, put your personality into it. Have your employees blog too, and give them freedom to be unique. As readers get to know each of you through the blog, they will form relationship. This relationship will generate higher quality leads for your business.

4. Taps into Various Expertise - With different people blogging for your business, you give potential customers access to a wider depth of knowledge. You and your staff have diverse interests and expertise, so give people access to that resource. You want it to relate back to your core business identity, but this variety will help engage various types of consumers.

5. Provides a Resource for Current Customers - It's said that it costs anywhere from 5 to 10 times more to get a new client than to keep an existing one. Furthermore, according to Bain & Company, "Increasing client retention by 5% can increase profit by 95%." To increase your customer retention, you have to offer excellent customer service. A blog provides an excellent venue for addressing frequently asked questions, providing service updates, spreading the news of any problems with product or service, starting a forum to connect customers, and offering another point of connection to keep customers happy.

6. Keeps You Sharp - Blogging involves an online connection with customers, leads, and others in your industry. By staying engaged in this way, you stay on the top of your game and ahead of your competition. When you are blogging about the latest industry news, answering the latest customer questions, and providing helpful information for online users, you are forced to do more research, read related news, and keep up to date on latest developments and trends. Plus when you teach something, it helps further cement that knowledge into your brain. This type of acumen building is exactly what you need to run a successful business.

It is time to lay aside all those excuses and start blogging. Remember, results take time, so stick with it and let the customers start coming to you rather than chasing them down.

Learn more about growing your business by visiting smbmarketingideas.com or downloading this free marketing ebook designed to help you maximize your business marketing efforts: http://smbmarketingideas.com/free-ebook/

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Blogging Your Business - Is It for Me?

These days everyone has a blog, from sports figures to celebrities to the guy down the hall in IT. Everyone is blogging, so that naturally begs the question -- should my business have a blog to be successful?

The answer to that question is fairly simple in my opinion. All businesses can benefit from blogging, but service-related businesses (Realtors, Photographers, etc) and smaller retail stores are going to see the most benefit from blogging. The reason for this is twofold -- one, both of these industries are serving a customer who may not realize precisely what they want or need. Weekly blog posts can help solidify such a need in the customer's mind. Two, many of these types of businesses rely heavily on referrals (word-of-mouth business) and blogging lends itself well to referral business because the customer has the opportunity to learn more about the business immediately upon being referred.Many business owners want to start a blog but they don't know where to begin. Tumblr of course is a great platform, as is WordPress and Blogger. I have used all three and found Tumblr to be the best simply because of the social media integration (think of it as a Facebook for bloggers) as well as the ability to upload pictures, video, text, and audio from virtually anywhere. Tumblr assigns you an email address that you can use to upload content on the fly, and Tumblr's servers are smart enough to know what the content is before posting. If you upload a video it shows up in a media player, as opposed to a link. Audio files get the same sort of treatment.

Once the blogging service has been chosen, the hard stuff begins. Many businesspeople will feel overwhelmed at the prospect of writing an online "article" every week or even every month. Some people just aren't born writers, and blogging is certainly a skill that requires development like everything else. There is hope, however, for those who would like a little help. Many business consultants can be hired-in for copy writing purposes, and some will even manage the blog entirely. The rates for such services are fairly inexpensive -- from $50 a post or $20 - $25 an hour. Some owners will opt to use this sort of service every once-and-awhile until they feel comfortable devoting the time needed to make the blog successful.

Once content is present on the blog, it's time to share! This can be done via the company's Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ page. Also some businesses that will rely heavily on blogging (Photographers are an example) can set-up their website address to redirect to their blog. This makes it very easy for customers to access their photos (or jewelry, or anything else creative) without having to jump through multiple sites.

Having a robust following to your blog is great but not essential. A business consultant specializing in social media can give you a few tips on how to increase your follower ship. Just realize that building an audience takes time and patience, and there is no magic bullet for gaining 1,000 followers in a day. The fact that your blog is present and being updated regularly is the first step towards having a large audience.

T. Andrew Bledsoe holds a Bachelors of Science in Digital Media Communications and a strategic marketing MBA from King College. Andrew is a marketing strategist at Summit Marketing specializing in online marketing & social media. During his free time Andrew enjoys running, reading about marketing strategies, and designing websites. Andrew's Online Marketing Blog.

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Information on Thesis 2.0 Theme

The new Thesis 2.0 theme for WordPress, released on 1st October, 2012 is the much awaited update to the popular Thesis theme. This new version offers much more freedom and many more features to its users. This new system will change the way users design their WordPress sites and includes features that allow for completely original pages.

Features of Thesis 2.0

The new Thesis theme is packed to the brim with features that users have been waiting for. They allow for a completely new level of customization so that users can create web pages exactly the way they conceptualize them.

· Thesis Boxes - Thesis boxes make your FTP client obsolete. These boxes allow users to integrate CSS styles and code into the Thesis flow without any hassle of going through the FTP client.

· Skins - The Thesis 2.0 skins are similar to child themes in terms of concept. Thesis 2.0 allows you to load more than one skin at any given time. You can load these skins on the same site and you can even switch between the skins.

· Site Verification - The Thesis HTML head window has a Site Verification link on the right side of the page so that users can easily verify their website on Bing and Google. Google authorship is also available on the site through this page.

· Custom 404 Page - Thesis 2.0 allows users to create their own custom 404 page. Many sites make themselves more interesting by using funky or funny 404 pages. Now, the Thesis 2.0 theme extends this privilege to its users as well.

Benefits of Thesis 2.0

The new features on Thesis 2.0 also constitute a whole list of benefits that make it one of the best WordPress themes available. The following benefits add more spice and flavor to Thesis 2.0.

· HTML over PHP - Thesis 2.0 is built in such a way that users will be using HTML to customize their web pages. Earlier, users used PHP for customization, as the HTML coding was already provided and fixed. However, Thesis 2.0 uses a different approach and reverses this trend. The new theme automatically inserts the PHP coding, leaving the HTML blank for the user to customize.

· Innumerable Menus - Thesis 2.0 allows users to add as many menus as they require and at any spot on the site.

· Various Templates - Thesis 2.0 allows the use of different templates for every single thing. The new theme offers users the ability to customize templates for any category, tab, post, custom taxonomy and so on. Most importantly, users do not need to know code for this.

· SEO - Thesis 2.0 is the best SEO platform out there. The various options for SEO make it very efficient. The coding on the pages is also clean so that Google bots can easily trace the keywords and show the website on the search results page.

Pros of Thesis 2.0:

Thesis 2.0 comes with a list of pros that make it easy to pick this product over all the other themes.

· No Code - The previous Thesis theme required users to know code in order to make a webpage. Thesis 2.0 can even be used by novices who do not know an iota of code. While it still enables users to use code in places where they need it, on the whole, there is no use for code as Thesis takes care of everything for the designer.

· No HTML Limitations - Thesis 2.0 takes the theme to new heights by removing all limitations on HTML. Users can now customize their webpage completely according to their imagination.

· Unlimited Widget Areas - Thesis 2.0 incorporates an unlimited amount of widget areas in any location on the page. It is the final goodbye to custom code and plugins. Most plugins will now be obsolete when using Thesis 2.0.

Cons of Thesis 2.0:

As with all products, Thesis 2.0 comes with its own list of cons as well, though not many.

· No Inbuilt Tutorials - Thesis 2.0 comes with no tutorials to explain how to use it. However, if the user has been using Thesis, it should not be a problem. There is one beginning page to get users started on the theme, and they can explore thenceforth.

· Is Drag and Drop a Real Drag? - Despite the overt ease of use that it conveys, the Drag and Drop facility will always find its detractors. It is not always as easy as it seems. However, over time, users can get habituated to it.

The Thesis 2.0 theme for WordPress allows users to really customize their websites in any manner they wish to. It provides complete freedom while eliminating the need to know any code. The various features offered by Thesis 2.0 makes it the ultimate WordPress theme for the realization of a site owner's design dreams.

Avneet Bhatia has been writing content for over 6 years now. Her knowledge of content writing includes SEO optimized articles, blogs, press releases and newsletters etc.

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How to Repurpose Your Blog Posts for Maximum Influence

Not long ago, I wrote a blog post titled Content Repurposing: Five Experts Share Their Favorite Secrets. In that article, several of my most trusted online marketing colleagues, including Denise Wakeman, Kathleen Gage, Nicole Dean and Marnie Pehrson, weighed in with their most effective and powerful repurposing strategies, along with my own.

In the article you are reading now, I want to expand on just one of those strategies, to give you a deeper understanding of exactly how you can use it to expand your reach, and your industry influence.

One of my favorite ways to repurpose content is to take a portion of another article or blog post, and expand it into a different article for the article directories.

For example, this article is a direct expansion of one of the points from the blog post, Content Repurposing, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I'm simply taking one idea from among the many ways to repurpose content that I revealed in the original blog post, and now I'm expanding on that one point to make a complete article that stands on its own.

This is easiest to do when you have written a blog post that contains a list, such as The Top Ten Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website, 21 Creative Ways to Get Your Toddler to Eat Vegetables or even 5 Quick and Easy Ways to Lose Your Belly Fat. Your niche is irrelevant here, as this tactic will work for any niche.

The best part about doing this is that after you explain and expand on your one point, you can then direct the reader to go over to your blog to get the rest of the content, which is directly related to what they have just read.

Now this does take a bit more work than simply copying and pasting your original blog content to the article directories, but it's well worth it, as it bypasses completely the issue of duplicate content and gives your readers a compelling reason for coming over to your blog to get the rest of your ideas.

I also don't worry about trying to plaster this content all over the web by submitting to hundreds of free article directories. That's an old tactic, and it doesn't work anymore. Instead, I stick with the two major content marketing sites on the web today, EzineArticles.com and IdeaMarketers.com.

And because I'm using multiple ways of repurposing my original content (I discuss over a dozen more in my Content Repurposing article on my blog!), I'm not concerned about showing up on 'only' two article directories.

The 'trick' to this tactic is to write the article from your original blog post, just as soon as your post is completed. If you wait, thinking you'll do it later, chances are it will never get done.

You can get the rest of my content repurposing strategies mentioned in this article (plus learn how to expand your influence!) at the Marketing Qi blog

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BMR Writing at a Glance

In the world of freelance writing the term "BMR writing" stands for "Build My Rank." If you are a freelance writer chances are you have already done some of this kind of writing whether you are familiar with the term or not. This kind of writing has become extremely popular in the fast growing and important process of promoting new websites.

Most often BMR writing is used to help place a website within an internet search on a particular topic. Since each website owner wants their site to receive a favorable ranking and therefore generate more visitors there is an incredibly high demand for these kinds of articles. Since the placement of each article in a search is dependent on the use of keywords it is important to use the particular keywords provided to you by your employer so that your article will be placed in a favorable ranking at the beginning of a search. The amazing thing about this kind of writing is that there is such enormous demand for it these days.

On average a BMR article needs to be no more than 150 to 300 words with a high concentration of the specific keywords. They are simple to write but significant for placing a particular website in a favorable spot at the top of an internet search. For this reason website owners are all clamouring for hundreds and hundreds of these mini articles. However since they are short and simple website owners will seldom pay more than about a dollar (USD) for each one and sometimes as little as.50 to.75 cents. Therefore the key to making any money in the kind of writing is to do it in very high volume.

It is very easy to find work in BMR writing. Just go onto any freelance writing website and scan the "want ads" and you will literally find hundreds of postings. Then simply place your bids and wait for the offers to come to you. Once you have made a connection with an employer you will need to be prepared for the work to come at you fast and furious. Since the demand is so incredibly high for this kind of writing there is no shortage of articles that will need to be written.

It is very easy to write these articles. Simply stick closely to the given topic, use clear simple sentences, make sure to use the keywords to your employer's specifications and be sure your spelling and grammar are correct. In order to be successful in the field of BMR writing it is important to be creative and prolific as a writer. Often it will help to seek out employment from more than one employer so that you can receive a broader range of topics to write on. This will also help increase the volume that of work you will be given and ultimately lead to more pay. If you are both creative and prolific then you should have no problem finding work and making money in BMR writing.

ArticlesatWork is an organization of high caliber writers headed by Rochella Caguin. It was formed in July of 2010. To date, this organization served a wide array of clients worldwide.

ArticlesAtWork can deliver contents for your websites, can do ezine postings, ebooks, product description, article writing, language translation, medical writing, and blog posting. Occasionally, they work on formula templates, website building, virtual assisting, and voice over.

You may order articles at http://www.articlesatwork.com/ or get in touch with Chella at articles.at.work@gmail.com.

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