Internet Marketing Solution

A blog, or weblog is a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.

But more than that, it can provide you with maximum exposure for your creativity. All it takes is to hit the ‘post’ or ‘publish’ button and your writing is now out there for the world to see!

Blogs are everywhere on the internet today. Their ease of use and global reach have been a big reason for their popularity.

Blogger.com and WordPress are free as are many other blog tools.

There is no delay for the printing presses to roll it out, it’s published. And there’s another reason for their popularity with internet marketers as well…

Social Proof The fact that people post comments on your blog is social proof at work. This is very important for the marketer. It only helps your business when others know that your product or service is popular.

Here’s an example. If you go to a restaurant on a Friday night and no one is there, are you going to wonder about the food or the service? I’m betting that you will. But if you go to a busy restaurant, where you have to wait, you will think to yourself “it must be good if everyone is willing to wait”.

This is social proof at work.

When you visit a regular site, you have no real way of knowing if anyone else visits it. Techniques like putting up testimonials, showing a hit counter, etc… will help put your mind at ease that you’re not the only one considering what the site has to say. Having links on other sites also helps because people start feeling confident that your site is popular.

Blogs have a social proof feature built right into them….

The comments.

If others are interested in what you post and even comment on it then that shows that you have a sort of community. You want this. Never disable the comments on your blog. You can of course read them first and delete those that are spam, but the comments are crucial.

It shows that someone read actually reads your blog and feels strongly enough about it that they wanted to make a comment.

If you’d like to learn more about Blogs, I recommend Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS. Click here to learn more about this step-by-step video package that will help you get your blog up and running in 48 hours.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, weblog, RSS, social proof

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Did you know that one of the best ways to get free traffic to your wordpress blog is through Technorati?

You don’t even need to do any search engine optimization to get your blog posts to rank high in this popular blog search engine.

You can start getting traffic through Technorati quite easily by simply tagging your posts.

What is tagging?

Tags are basically keywords. A tag can be a category or a subject. When we talk about tagging, all we are basically referring to is how you summarize what your webpage or site is about.

Is it about dogs?

If so, then you might want to use the tag, “dogs”.

What else is your site (or blog) about?

Perhaps German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, dog training, and puppy toys.

Well, then all these would make great tags as well.

So the concept of tagging is not really that much different from your standard keywords.

If you’re interested in learning more about flooding your blogs with free traffic from Technorati, you may want to check out my Tagging Secrets ebook. There is also a free blog (with content) at the site, just visit http://www.taggingsecrets.com/blog/.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, tagging, Technorati, tags

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Should you go with Mambo or Joomla? Well at this point I’m not sure it really matters. They are both very similar content management systems. I’m sure someone with more technical skills than I have will disagree with me, but for now, I just don’t see much difference.

Both have the same admin, use the same templates, and many of the same components, modules, and mambots (these are really just plugins). I’m sure as time progresses, mambo and joomla will become less like each other, but it just hasn’t seemed to happen yet.

I did notice that joomla had a couple of bugs that were a little surprising. By that I mean the system works great as is, but when you start adding plugins, a couple of the most popular ones did not seem to “play nice” together. The Joomla community already had an update to fix it though by the time I came across the problem.

There is an enormous amount of support for both of these CMS’s. I just don’t think you’d go wrong choosing one over the other — so just pick one and get started building your community sites!

Technorati Tags: content management systems, Mambo, Joomla

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I’m a big fan of content management systems (CMS). I define a content management system as a tool you can use to create, manage, and publish your information easily without having to hand code all the different pages. So according to my definition, I consider many of the blogging platforms to be content management systems. Really, it just depends on your definition as to whether you agree with me or not (Wikipedia.org defines it this way to so I’m sticking with it).

I regularly use Mambo & Joomla and of course, Wordpress to help publish my content (this site uses Wordpress if you didn’t already realize it). There are a ton of others out there as well. I suggest you start with just one and once you have mastered it, move on to another if you need to. Each CMS will have its own learning curve, so you don’t want to waste your time figuring out the details of each.

For the purposes of most internet marketers, Wordpress will do the trick. If you want to do something a little more fancy, then Mambo or Joomla might suit you. Drupal is another CMS that is commonly used. Each of these four content management systems are open source, meaning they are free. There is also a ton of support for each of these. Watch out for other open source CMS’s that might not be as actively supported.

The main factors you want to consider when choosing a content management system are; is there support, will it produce a site that is search engine friendly, and are you going to be able to use it quickly and easily. I’ve found that Mambo/Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal meet this criteria.

Someone else may prefer another CMS over what I’ve listed here. It’s really just personal preference. But I’d suggest if you’re planning to make money from the internet, unless you want to make it as a CMS expert, just pick a couple to use … there’s no need to try them all.

Technorati Tags: blog, search engine, content management systems, Mambo, Joomla, Wordpress

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