experimentia-exp

Article Directories

Author: buzz42, 26/09

Sometimes what you want is a good hit of links back or a good collection of articles. So regardless of if you are submitting or collecting this list of article sources is for you. After all when you need free content that is of a reasonable value and quality you need to shop around and when you are looking to get your name about by submitting articles again you need to shop around.

• isnare.com
• informit.com
• ezinearticles.com
• knowledge-finder.com
• goarticles.com
• articlecube.com
• articlerich.com
• theoracle2006.com
• article-hangout.com
• www.article-wiz.com
• articlelists.com
• mega-articles.com
• contentfueled.com
• activearticles.com
• articles-galore.com
• eclipse-articles.com
• articlegarden.com
• articlenic.com
• activearticle.com
• article-outlet.com

Of course is is just a fraction of the possible article directories available on the web but it makes a good start we feel.

SEO - Review :: Recover from the sand box

Author: buzz42, 06/07

By Lord Matt, Super Geek.

The sand box is where Google puts sites until they get themselves sorted out. It's bad for traffic.

Google is a difficult lover. She smiles at you and your site fills with visitors but then the one thing that caused her favour then beings her disfavour and your site grows cold and dead.

What can you do about it?

One answer is to build a community so that even if every search engine blinks out tomorrow you still have visitors. But how do you get the first visitors so you can build on something?

You must rely on the flighty love of the search engines.

One such sufferer of the flightiness of the big G! is sammysouthallphotography.co.uk who finds himself slipping out of the search engine results as fast as he gets in.

After he left three comments mentioning his problem at buzz42.com I felt that this deserved the personal attention of Lord Matt, Super Geek.

So have spent several moments getting to know his site.

First I am going to break down the problems and then I am going to sketch out a cure.

The listings are not all bad his business shows up top for his post code but not the site.

The first issue is traction. The site has no traction with the search engines.

what grants traction is text.

What takes traction is bad SEO. For example:

<p align="left"><!--//TopListed Link Code Begins//-->
<a href="http://weddingphotographersuk.toplisted.net/index_12354.html" target="win_weddingphotographersuk.toplisted.net"></a>
<!--//TopListed Link Code Ends//--></p>

This snippet is just for the search engines and is leaking PR to a leech site. Google hates this sort of thing. (Plus the site timed out on me).

I never understand what this sort of thing gains for a site but I would guess that some sort of bad neighbourhood with blackhat techniques is the source of this devaluation of the site. This will keep you in sandbox mode forever.

A sure sign of sandbox mode is lack of back link registered:

Google :   0.
Yahoo  : 136.
MSN    :   0.

There is also some on site blackhat (or bad) SEO. Like some keyword stuffing.



This will also get your site sandboxed.

It's a shame to get sandboxed for something like that because it easy to do it right (read on for that).

One last fault is that there is some bad link text.



The screen shot is from the site map. Notice the anchor text has all those dots in. These dots are going to do three things to you.

1. They upset the grammar police who will be upset because it is incorrect (it's a pet peeve of mine too)
2. They look messy and distract from the aim of the text. There are better ways of denoting hanging meaning like this: "Wow(!)"... if you must have them keep it two three dots to cure point one and two
3. You are telling Google that this page is related to "..." or "........" which is just silly in SEO.

This adds up to a site that will have a hard time returning results for people because there is very little actual content beyond the glam of the look.

Fortunately the doctor is in.

There needs to be more content. content is the King of SEO. Content is the gold of search engines. It is spidered and indexed and this is what is searched for.

For your site to show up in results there needs to be content for the search engines to return results on. This means using words to talk about stuff. Your sites stuff.

If, like sammysouthallphotography.co.uk you are a photography outfit then you must talk about photography. Photographs, prints, sittings and so forth.

If you are Lord Matt, Super Geek (me) then you talk about geeky things. That's what I do. PHP, News, Promotion, SEO, MyBlogLog and Web 2.0... I talk a good line on geek.

Words! This is what is needed. Words communicate well and search engines are fixated on them.

A good way to achieve good wordage is to document the work you do and do it "on site". If you find putting words on paper is hard you can hire people to write for you. You will need to pay a lot to get a writer or wordsmith that will make it sound half as good as you could.

A professional writer of good quality might charge up to £1 or £2 per word. It's not unheard of for free lance writers to ask for and get thousands for a few hundred words. While £50 to £150 is more common the best words may come at the top price. You will pay this price in money or in time but you will pay it.

So you must choose between taking on a writer or sitting down one evening and bashing out a few short essays.

Design wise sammysouthallphotography.co.uk looks great but I did not know where I wanted to go. There were too many options and much of that was lazy linking.

Most of this navigation related to galleries. Lots of them. The links for these should have been on a page by themselves. They are interesting end pages but they have so little text on them that they act as dead wood.

There were too many other sites carrying content on topics that should have been written up for the site. This missed opportunity is dead wood SEO wise. Also all the graphical links for this phase of examination shall be considered SEO deadwood As they are great for people but duff for engines.

Shed this dead wood from the front page and the site shows its true colours - it's empty. There is nothing on the site.

That is the problem. No content.

This can be easily improved by written at least 25 to 50 words for every page. Especially the galleries so that "in text alone" the page says what's on the page.

The gallery flash pages should say what's in the gallery. Where you took the images and what you had to overcome would also help along with any interesting stories about the day.

Go further! Tell the stories behind the photographs. Talk about your art - Show the human being.

This is a full time business so there must be something to share each and every day? If this is too pressing there must be something of significance every week. Share it.

A free blog platform like NulceusCMS can be skinned to look like the rest of the site. This gives us something to put into a site feed which is like a low maintenance mailing list. In fact run it through feed burner and you can have people get your content via email.

this also gives an easy platform to add your content.

The blog platform also gives you access to specialist search sites that will send you traffic.

The bad SEO need to go in favour of internal links.

Where keyword lists exist try phrases that use the words. Make the phrases mean something so that people will want to read them. This will give your site more traction.

Again a blog platform would make this very easy.

Having done all this you will have something to tweak for SEO. You will have something fresh to offer Google to keep her coming back to your site and you will have some traction for the engines to rate you buy.

Now were you to hire me to do this work you would be looking at a few thousand pounds plus time and expenses which would cover support and tuition. However, given enough time you can do it all for yourself just by following the advice here.

I have been known to do content but if some one wanted me to do that they would want to have a reasonable resource of funds as I charge hourly rates plus expenses and would travel to where you were to get to know the business. I quite fancy a holiday to the USA, France or maybe Holland so anyone living in those countries is especially encouraged to hire me as I am less than two hours from two main London Airports and have a local airport less than 12 minuets from my house.

Once more do you need to bring me from my home in Kent to you (or you to me) when you could write your own content and you only charge yourself the cost of lunch.

It's a pipe dream to expect anyone to pay me to travel as far as France or Holland but not unheard of so if not for hope what do we have? On that track I'd travel to Birmingham for the right price. (I happen to know that our main site for analysis has it's HQ near there). I'm not entirely sure why people pay others to do what they can do for themselves.

That's not totally true. sometimes your time is worth more to you to have someone else do "the hard stuff".

I may have done myself out of lots of work but on the whole I would rather give than watch people suffer. Most all problems with a website can be cured by removing dirty tricks and replacing with solid content.

Revive Your Boring Blog With These Ideas

Author: buzz42, 22/04

by Lynette Chandler

At one time or another every blogger experiences some kind of block and wonders what they should be writing about. It is just the same with business blogs. The fear of not knowing what to say on a blog is in fact one of the most common laments I hear from business bloggers.

There are many places and situations from where business bloggers can find inspiration, but it often takes practice. With a little experience you will be able to quickly notice which topics and ideas will work well on your blog. Sometimes when uninspired, the best place to start is, believe it or not, your calendar.

Each year there are hundreds of holidays and events that you can use to get ideas for posting to your blog. We all know of the common holidays like New Year's Eve, Mother's Day, Father's Day and Valentines Day but many people don't know when Earth or Administrative Professionals days are. You're keeping people up to date and you'll also be filling your blog with content at the same time. The potential of these kinds of posts is to bring you traffic time after time because even though they are season they are evergreen as well.

Here's an example. Did you know that February is International Expect Success Month or that the first Sunday of every August is Friendship Day? These are excellent topics with wide appeal. No matter what your market is, you can surely find something to tie these events into your business blog.

On International Expect Success Day, a school supplies store could blog about how to have a well rounded discussion with your child about the many faces of success, or ideas for teachers who want to use this day in their teachings. %SEN2%

Friendship Day, can benefit even the most unlikely blogs. For example, a handy man's business blog can talk about how some customers have become good personal friends. We know that happens a lot. It also shows your readers - potential customers and referrers, you are approachable, easy to work with and likeable. People do not hire those they do not like.

You can find more events in your community and even worldwide. Do a quick search online and you will be able to come up with many blogging ideas as you read through the calendars you find. You can also create your own calendar or holiday. Having this type of relevant information on your blog will let your readers know you keep up to date and gives you topics to blog about throughout the year.

Lynette Chandler helps entrepreneurs recognize and apply the power of technology to their marketing. Discover how web conferencing can work for your business today at http://www.webconferencingworks.com

Article Source: ActiveAuthors.com

The Philosophy Of Why Blogging And Publishing Content Online Is So Important And Profitable

Author: buzz42, 20/04

by Cynthia Minnaar

Most people surfing the Internet are looking for information. In other words, most people are not actively seeking to buy a product and nearly everyone expects to get the information for free.

Speaking specifically about the market place of people who are "interested" in having an online home business and/or generating income from the web, most of these people want to find good information about the subject first.

Therefore, by becoming a provider of trustworthy information about online home businesses, legitimate work at home opportunities and ways to generate income online, positions you as the source for what people are actually looking for in the first place.

Then, when people find your information and get engaged in the articles, they will naturally find the links that point to your sales page and visit them. Now, they have already been pre-sold and have more trust in the link to your sales page because they have already benefited by reading the free information provided in the article on your blog!

Also, blogs are the most search engine friendly Internet publishing tool in existence. This means that the pages of your blog can start being indexed by the search engines almost immediately and some of your blog content pages will start showing up in the free listings of the search engines when people search for various keywords. Therefore, adding quality content to your blog on a regular basis can generate free targeted traffic to your website potentially forever.

Publishing a blog allows you to instantly create new content-rich web pages. These new pages can be linked to from the home page of your current website and/or promoted separately. By creating additional content-rich website pages and promoting them from your home page or through other means, you will be accomplishing two important things:

1) You will provide more value for your website visitors. This increases the "stickiness" of your website making people stick around longer and ultimately trust you more. On the Internet, trust translates to profits!

2) Search engines love fresh content created through blogs. By publishing your own blog and adding fresh content to it on a regular basis, you will attract the attention of the major search engines who will list your website in their directories for free. As soon as you have pages of your blog in the search engines, you will start attracting free qualified traffic to your site without paying a dime for it. Imagine running a large and comprehensive Google Adwords campaign without paying anything for it. That is exactly what you can accomplish by publishing your own blog!

Anytime you have some news to share about your business, it is a great idea to use your autoresponder to let your subscribers know about it. You could even link your autoresponder to your blog, so that each time you post information on your blog your subscribers are notified by email. This type of active relationship building can make a huge impact on your business. The more you interact with your subscribers, the more they will trust you and want to do business with you!

With a blog, the publishing possibilities are only limited by your own imagination. The point to realize is that, as a blog publisher, you have just unlocked a huge window of opportunity for yourself!

Cynthia Minnaar is the owner and webmaster of www.cyns-home-biz.com, the site for online home business opportunities, internet income training, web income ideas, ideas to start an online home business, online home business tools, ebooks and articles. Start your own online home business with a money-making site complete with 400 day pre-written email autoresponder campaign.

Article Source: ActiveAuthors.com

How to acquire one way inbound links.

Author: buzz42, 30/12

By Salihu Ibrahim

How can one get a good ranking in the major search engines ? This is a question, I'm sure, agitates the minds of every newbie as well as professional webmaster. Even those that are doing well are fighting to keep their place. But isn't there a way to consistently appear in a good position at the major search engines? I think there are ways to achieve this enviable position. One of the ways is what this article is all about. That is, consistently build one way inbound links to your site. Getting other webmasters to link to your site without you linking back.

Link Popularity, link prominence or link reputation is one of the most important elements search engines use to know if a site is an authority site. That is a quality site. However, like all other search engine ranking criteria, webmasters have found ways to beat this hurdle of link popularity. This they have done by exchanging links with one another. This is called reciprocal linking. You link to me and I to you and both of us have increased our link popularity by one.

Webmaster have realized the importance search engines attached to link popularity for top search engine positioning and have therefore resorted to reciprocal linking. However, in the near future this strategy will become obsolete, because these links are artificial links. Not generated voluntarily. And so they do not indicate a site as being an authority site.

The purpose of reciprocal linking is to increase link prominence for top search engine positioning and not necessarily for the benefit of web surfers. The search engines will recognize this. I predict that they will start taking this into account when they are changing their algorithms . The webmaster that will survive is one that consistently builds one way inbound links to his site. These types of links are the best. It portrays a site as being an authority site because the site is linked to naturally by other webmasters. Without reciprocal links.

Webmasters would not like to link to just any site unless there is some benefit for their site or site visitors. In this modern world nothing goes for nothing. A webmaster will only link to your site if there is some benefit for his site.

Why webmasters would link voluntarily.

Now in order for you to succeed in this one way inbound link building strategy, you need to know some of these benefits that lead webmaster to link voluntarily. If you like, call it the carrot. In accepting and eating the carrot the webmaster is led to link to your site. Let's look at some these benefits before we look at how they can be used to entice webmasters to link to you.

1. Webmasters would want to provide good, important and timely information for their visitors. If your site has this information, they will readily link to you. They could for example, point their visitors to a free resource at your site.
2. Webmasters recognize the fact that providing good information creates a good image for their site. Visitors will get to know that the site is a good resource site even though the resource might not be located there. This keeps visitors coming back again and again.
3. There is also the benefit of linking to an authority site. Search engines do award some points for linking to an authority site. Contrary to popular belief that this reduces the overall link popularity of a site, it actually benefits that page . This is my practical experience.

Now how do you acquire these one way inbound links?

1. Provide some useful resource at your site. This is a very powerful incentive for webmasters to link to your site. More so, if this resource is free. It could be a free tool , free software download, free content etc. This gives an incentive for webmasters to point their visitors at this resource. Some the resources you could provide are:

(a) Link popularity check tool
(b) Meta tag generator
(c) Search engine page analyzer
(d) Free CGI scripts
(e) Search engine page ranking check tool etc.

For free and paid scripts go to Hotscript.com or Searchscripts.com. There you will find all kinds of scripts that perform specific functions. Or you can hire a programmer to write a custom script for you. You will find programmers at many sites such as Elance.com.

2. Write good articles and submit to article sites, article syndicate sites and ezine announcement sites. Your article will be published along with your byline with a link pointing to your site. Make sure that the text link has your keywords in it and not your domain name. For example, home base business ideas and not www.ebizstartups.com

Webmasters are always looking for good content for their websites . Stating in your article that your byline be left intact you will have many one way inbound links pointing at your site in no time. If you cannot write, hire a writer to write your articles for you. There are many places on the net where you can hire a writer for as little as $5 per article. This depends on the number of words per article. One of these places to hire a writer is Elance.com.
Writing in your area of expertise is better. Then you can present your own unique perspective to the topic. If it is not your area of expertise then be sure to research the topic very well . An incisive, well-written article will be snapped up and published by other webmasters, thereby increasing your link popularity considerably.

3. Another way to build your one way inbound link is to participate intensively in newsgroups and discussion forums. By making good and valuable contributions (postings) you establish yourself as an expert. Always try to be different and stand out. Others will see this and check out your profile. This will lead them to check out your site and eventually link to it. If signature files are allowed in the forum use a well-crafted signature file that will pull forum members to your site

4. Enter your site for an award at award sites. If your site is selected for an award, a link is placed to your site and this increases your one way inbound links.

5. You could also acquire one way inbound links by offering to provide testimonials for products you have purchased. Send the manufacturer of the product or service an email offering to provide a testimonial at his site or sales page in return for a link back to your site.

6. Submit your site to directories. Especially, niche or specialist directories. Regional directories are also okay. Submitting your site to specialist directories gives your site a greater chance of being picked up by the search engines than when you submit to a general directory. Also consider paying for submission to some important directories. For a fee, these directories will index your site in their database within two to five business days. For a list of search engines and directories you can submit to for free and for a fee go to add url to directories. Consider hiring a link building company to do your link popularity campaign for you. One of such company is linkexpress.com For a fee they will guarantee a certain number of quality one way inbound links to your site. This might be expensive but the investment will surely pay off with traffic from free search engines.

8. You can offer a discount to webmaster on services you provide at your site in return for a link from their sites.

9. If you have goods or services for sale consider setting up an affiliate program. This is a very good way of rapidly building your link prominence. Make sure your affiliate software is hosted on your server. This ensures that your affiliates' links point back to your site . Using an affiliate service will most likely mean affiliate links will be pointing at their server, thereby depriving you of links. One very good affiliate software is ASSOTRAC.

Some points to note when building one way inbound links.

Your link popularity increases as websites link to you. However, it must be said that it is not the number but the quality of the links that is important. That is, emphasis should be on quality and not quantity. Not all links are equal. Some are more favored (carry more weight) than others. Some of the things to keep in mind when carrying out inbound links are;

1. Look for quality sites to acquire links from. A link from Dmoz or Yahoo has more weight than one from a small private web site. Submit to free or paid listings in important directories.

2. The way other sites link to you is very important. Try as much as possible, to see that your keywords are in the text link that is linking to you and not your domain name. With your keywords in the text link it portrays your site as an authority site for the keyword.

3. Acquire links from complementary sites. Sites that are in the same industry as yours, but are not your competitors. Links from these type of sites have more weight than from those that are not related to your site.

4. Links from specialist or niche directories also carry more weight than those from less important general directories and your links are easier to find by the search engines.
When submitting to directories, especially for a fee, be sure to choose a relevant category that is not deep down in the directory. Your listing should be at most three clicks away from the home page of the directory. Some engines will not spider deep down.

5. If you have several websites, link them together in such a way that the links are one way inbound links, and not reciprocal links. Also don't share the same IP address for the sites. All the sites should have unique IPs. This you can ensure by using a different host for each web site.

Conclusion.

Acquiring one way inbound links is the future of link popularity. Sooner the search engines will recognize the artificial nature of reciprocal linking in judging authority sites and will discount this in their algorithm or award less points (weight) to reciprocal links. The methods listed above in acquiring one way inbound links are basic, must do actions for every webmaster wishing to stay long at the top of the search engines.


The author has been earning his living online since 2000. For comprehensive home base business ideas check out one of his sites at http://www.ebizstartups.com There you will find solid, easy-to-do strategies for building a successful home base business.


Source: www.isnare.com

How to House a Successful Online Business

Author: buzz42, 19/12

by Reider Jack

It is worth taking the time to make your site more search engine friendly, because it will bring you profit and appropriate exposure. Here are some simple advices on building successful web site for your online business.

How to build search engine friendly website? You can find plenty material when browsing the Internet, but a good foundation cannot sabotage your online initiative. A search engine friendly site is not just beneficial for top ranking in the search engines, but also helps to attract customers, thus getting business for you.

Before designing a site, make sure you have got a good domain name. The Domain name is your URL or Universal Resource Locator as in what a person types into the search engine bar like yoursite.com and others. Hypothetically, if your business is related to something like ruleta then it is good to have the word "ruleta" included into the domain name separated by dashes from other words or numbers. Generic domain names may help in search engine listing. It will be easier to find the sequence of words within a domain name directly related to the main idea of your business.

Make your site content based with at least two hundred words holding clear information of your products, services and business. This will help your potential customer to know about you and get some information on products they require. Apart from verbal description, you might use web design attributes to underline your point. Please do not startle the visitor of your web site with blinking texts, shocking colors and confusing animations on the web pages. The website must have a clean look so that the web visitor will feel relaxed to get all relevant information about your services, otherwise, he will shut it down within a minutes.

Keep the site simple and easy to navigate. Complicated navigation will confuse the visitors. The navigation must be user-friendly and easily understood by the visitors. If you search through search engine results, you will find all the top ranking websites are optimized properly. These optimized websites make their presence felt in the search engines by making their site user friendly with good navigation, content texts, and Meta tags relevant to their websites, and having proper placed images. Why shouldn't you use such simple tool like navigation at your favorite?

News relevant to your site is also a great way to bring in traffic. Many people nowadays get their news online and not just world news. Maybe someone wants to read about the gambling bill that was passed in congress recently to ban money transfers to and from online casinos, a great advantage to having news on your page is that if it is well written piece of writing, other news sources like Yahoo and Google may take your masterpiece and put a link to it from their site. This would give you thousands of hits, and that is the goal.

While designing your website, the most important thing to remember your website is not to trick search engines by adding hidden texts or hidden links, irrelevant keywords or text, or very small text which is hardly visible for human eyes. Google usually punishes these websites by giving them low rank or sometimes removing them forever.

If you incorporate all these tips when building your website I can guarantee it will make your job much easier, no one wants to build a site and then find out they need to star over from scratch, because every day offline is potential money lost.

Use the above suggestions and utilize them into your company website in order to guarantee you stop losing money that you could be making.

Mia Pacheco is the Managing Editor for Juegos de Casinos and she examines the security risks and odds of playing certain games such as bacara and poker online.

Article Source: Free Reprint Articles | ContentFueled.com

How to Get Hired as a Professional Blogger

Author: buzz42, 10/12

By Shaun Peng

Step One: You have to make people want you. In other words, you'll need to make yourself valuable by being functionally attractive as a blogger that benefits the potential employer.

Step Two: You need to connect with opportunities. This could mean simply mean passively searching for blogging jobs or actively networking and applying for unadvertised or non-existent positions.

Step One: Establishing a Foundation

1. Create a Blog

This is a no-brainer. If you haven't already got one, you shouldn't really be looking for a job as a blogger. Your personal blog is a great way to showcase your writing skills, flair for design and passion for blogging. I feel that a blog on your own domain (instead of free hosted spots like Blogger) is far more impressive and shows your professionalism or knowledge of domain-level blog management, but that's just my opinion.

2. Learn to write well

No matter how good you are with words, there's always room for some improvement. Learning how to write effectively can attract and maintain readership for your blog. I personally find it extremely difficult to write in a caustic, humorous style, one that is full of witty sarcasm. To develop that elusive style, I practice on several blogs (though obviously not on this one!). Blogging often and frequently is important to develop a grasp of the written word. Obviously, employers going to scrutinize your blogs and writing samples so learning to develop a strong and creative personal style can be very helpful indeed. Some excellent resources which can helps one to develop clear and attractive copy can be found at A List Apart and CopyBlogger, two great blogs with many tips on blog style writing. Finally, please use a spellchecker!

3. Target a Niche

One of the most important things to do is to start identifying a niche that you are passionate about. Do you get turned on by gadgets? Does writing celebrity gossip float your boat? Perhaps you feel happy ranting on the horrors of contemporary art. Find something you like to do and start building a solid presence in the field through your personal blog and active participation in the industry or relevant blog community.

4. Build Professional Credibility

After starting a blog you might want to start building some professional credibility by writing for organizations or businesses. Freelance writers start to build their portfolio by writing for non-profit organizations and community newspapers before moving into the lucrative field of magazines. Bloggers can do the same by blogging for their local community/group or organization. It doesn't have to be profitable but it'll show that you have experience working as a professional writer.

Another alternative would be start a blog that primarily deals with sponsored posts, which would also show creativity by integrating corporate objectives into the overall feel or format of the blog. However not all organizations take nicely to sponsored blog posts, as they might that feel it detracts from the overwhelming, inherent passion that you are supposed to have for your niche. Blog for Blog's sake, geddit?

5. Get Organized

Use an electronic or paper organizer to jot down what jobs you've applied for and decide on a follow-up date in advance. An simple Microsoft Excel document will work wonders. If necessary, draft a well-written cover letter, a short resume and prepare several samples of your writing in fields of your interest. Excellent posts from your blog would do fine in this area.

Now that you're ready to work as a professional blogger, you'll have to actually find an organization that fits your interests and skill set. This leads us to the second part of the process.

Step Two: Connecting with Opportunities

The simplest way is to find a position you fancy would be to regularly visit job boards and marketplaces where writers are regularly sought for new or existing blogs. A more challenging process involves actively networking and direct solicitations of businesses.

Here's a list of my favorite blog resources and methods:

ProBlogger's Job Board.

One of my favorite places to browse for jobs. New positions appear very often on the board; sometimes on a daily to three day basis. Almost all of them are paid positions with networks or corporations but there are occasionally unpaid intern-style positions with established or upcoming blog ventures. Subscribe to their RSS feed to stay updated.

Performancing Exchange.

A classifieds style marketplace for the blogging community, Performancing is free for both advertisers and bloggers. While there are a lot of jobs to wade through, new positions only appear around every seven days. Some of the jobs include energy, poker, social network, celebrity gossip and finance blogging. Worth checking out. Once again, subscribe to their feed to stay in touch.

Craigslist.

I love craigslist! Depending on your area, there are usually several listings per day for writers and bloggers. Because blogging is not a location-specific job, I usually check out the big cities. Try London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and if you blog in Japanese, Tokyo. A great way to get involved with inter-continental networks and companies.

Indeed.com

A search engine for jobs. Just type in 'blogging' and you'll come up with a wide range of blogging or blog-related jobs. Indeed.com covers positions listed in ProBlogger, Monster, CareerBuilder and Ask Jeeves so use this engine if you are short of time though I recommend subscribing to individual job boards. Whats cool about Indeed.com is that you can also subscribe to the feed of a specific search result, so you'll always keep informed when new positions come up.

Jobster.

Not a lot of blogging jobs at this website but you'll get an odd few that doesn't show up on the other sites above. I love the web 2.0 look, though.

JournalismJobs.com.

A job board for media professionals, they usually have a lot of positions for web editors or bloggers affiliated with newspapers and magazines. Not a lot of blogging jobs but a very good resource if you want to break into freelance writing. Do a keyword search for 'blogging' to see what comes up.

Reuven Cohen | Enomaly's Job Board.

Over 50 blogging jobs are available at this board, which also offers listings for freelance designing, writing, editing and even CEO jobs. Some of the ads can be found on Problogger but there are several others that I didn't find anywhere else.

LinkedIn.

According to Wikipedia, LinkedIn has over 8 million registered users in over 130 industries. A social network site, LinkedIn allows you meet like-minded associates who might recommend you into important blogging positions. The process is a little difficult to explain so you might want to sign up and check it out.

Newspaper Classifieds.

There might be blogging positions open in your local classifieds. If you have the time, check out some career or employment magazines at the newstand. You might be surprised at what you find. I usually do this on the subway so it saves time.

Advertise Yourself.

Like to work for a specific company or organization? Promote yourself and enquire if they need a blog or blogger. Tell them you can effectively manage a blog or a team of bloggers, while generating incredible amounts of buzz on the internet. Tell them what you can achieve and why it would be useful for them. Tell them what sets you apart from the traditional avenues of online advertisements. Who knows, you just might get a position in organization that fits your aspirations or ideals.

Maki is a freelance writer for Dosh Dosh, an online journal that studies different methodologies for making money online.

http://doshdosh.blogspot.com/2006/11/how-to-get-hired-as-blogger.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shaun_Peng

Writing Effective Catalog Copy Or Web Copy Can Be Fun!

Author: buzz42, 20/09

By Marcia Yudkin

Once you learn a few fundamental principles and techniques, writing persuasive catalog copy, web copy or product descriptions for printed brochures or sales sheets becomes an easy, enjoyable process.

Step 1. List features and benefits, then connect them.

If you've read anything about copywriting, you've heard about the importance of including the benefits of products as well as their features. For instance, when you say your widget is a 2-inch pink plastic paperclip, you are describing its features. When you say it enables you to color-code stacks of papers or it attracts attention on someone else's desk or it makes a great gift for your organized-like-mad teenager, you are describing its benefits.

For concise, interesting product descriptions in a printed or online catalog, it's essential to combine features and benefits, weaving them together tightly yet unobtrusively. Here's a sample excerpt from the print catalog The Territory Ahead, mixing features and benefits:

Over cobblestone or dirt, concrete or causeway, the compression-molded midsole and metatomical footbed provide all-day, all-terrain cushioned support. (In other words, supreme comfort like we've never seen in a huarache.) Keen's patented bumpered toe prevents stubs and smashes. The traditional, tire-styled outsole features linen fabric inlay for additional strength and flex.

The widget's feature X gives you benefit Y. In one way or another (and there are at least 16 different ways to make this connection), this forms the foundation of catalog copy.

Step 2. Brainstorm angles and choose one as your opener.

Almost always, you'll also need an attention-getter for the headline and first sentence of your product description. Use the checklist at the top of this page, or the expanded one in 73 Ways to Describe a Widget, described below, to come up with an interesting way to think about the item. For instance, The Territory Ahead actually starts the product description quoted above with this answer to the question, "Who is it for?":

Ultralightweight, anatomically logical and muy guapa, Keen's huarache overhaul was done with the global wanderer in mind.

You can weave other elements from this brainstorming into your descriptive copy as space allows.

Step 3. Polish up your descriptions in a consistent voice.

Did you notice the way that the writing from The Territory Ahead has personality? Technically, this element is called voice, and it's what unifies the descriptions at a web site or in a catalog so that they have a corporate identity. When there's a tight match between the writing voice and the customers' interests and needs, the shopper feels the company is speaking directly to them, and that they're looking at the kind of widgets they'd most like to buy.

While the samples above from The Territory Ahead have a kind of masculine romance about them, a catalog or web site's voice could be efficient, technical, playful, practical, compassionate, soulful... There are a zillion possibilities.

Whatever the voice chosen, it must be consistent throughout the catalog or web site, or prospective customers get confused.

Step 4. Proofread, checking details.

As with any marketing or sales piece, the last step consists of proofreading, to make sure that you've included all the elements that people need to know before making a buying decision - size, color, composition, weight, price, etc. - along with making sure that the details provided are accurate.

Four steps - that's all there is to mastering the art of tantalizing product descriptions for catalogs or web sites.

About the Author: Marcia Yudkin, author of Persuading on Paper and 10 other books, specializes in compelling, yet hype-free copywriting. This article is adapted from her report, 73 Ways to Describe a Widget: Never Be Brain Dead Again When Having to Write Catalog Copy or Sales Material: http://www.yudkin.com/catalog.htm .

Source: www.isnare.com

The Blog: A Writing Practice

Author: buzz42, 12/08

by Peter Clothier

I write a blog. It's called The Bush Diaries and I write in it virtually every day. The Bush Diaries started on November 8, 2004. I had been stewing for a couple of days about the re-election of George W. Bush (if you happen to be of any other than liberal persuasion, don't stop here! The publisher of the book version of my blog, The Real Bush Diaries, tells me that he's at the opposite end of the political spectrum. He said he wanted to publish the manuscript because it made him think. Hurrah! Just what I had intended.)



Anyway, I happened to be more than a little puzzled--and, frankly, considerably dismayed--by the collective decision of the American electorate, and I felt I had to DO something. There's only one thing I really know, and that's how to write. On that particular day, I was stumbling around on the Internet in my usual clumsy way, without any particular purpose in mind, and fortuitously tumbled down into the blogosphere like Alice into that famous rabbit hole.



Oh joy! For a writer, the prospect of actually publishing some piece of my work every day was irresistible. And getting readers! What a medium! It was love at first sight. The title came to me as sheer inspiration, and within minutes, despite my primitive technical skills, I had the thing going. I was a blogger. I have been one ever since.



People sometimes ask me where I get the discipline to sit down at the computer and punch out something every single day. Well, almost. They imagine it takes some special quality to stick to it in this way, and they want to know the secret of my unquestionably admirable dedication.



Okay, I do have a secret. Quite apart from the ample resource of material with which our president thoughtfully provides me out the undoubted goodness of his heart, and quite apart from the genuine passion for change his presence in office seems to inspire in me, I do have a secret. And I'll share it with you, absolutely free, without charge or obligation whatsoever, as an act of pure, altruistic generosity.



It's a simple one, really, a piece of linguistic legerdemain (if that's not too much of an alliterative mix of metaphors), a shift of verbal gears from the negative to the positive. It's just that I don't call it discipline. I call it practice.



Which means I don't think of it as discipline, either. I don't know about you, but the very word inspires me with nothing but stomach-crunching dread. It reminds me of my days in boarding school and the painful rap on the knuckles with a hard wooden ruler when I failed to learn my French irregular verbs--which was fairly often, I ruefully admit. It sounds like punishment, or military boot camp. It sounds like a straight back and a stiff upper lip. It conjures up coercion of the worst kind. It's encrusted with a repulsive freight of dutiful shoulds and oughts and or elses. In a word, it's paralyzing.



Ah, but practice! What a delightful word! Both a noun and a verb, it has two different spellings in my native English--the Queen's English, that is: stand up, everyone, and salute--to honor its dual nature: practice, the noun, and practise, the verb. No matter, we'll speak American here. A single spelling will suffice.



So there's practice, the verb, as in that old chestnut about the visitor to New York City asking for directions on the street: How do I get to Carnegie Hall? Answer: Practice, practice, practice. It's what you have to do enough of to get good at what you do. If you play a tuba, you blast away for eight hours a day (and damn the upstairs neighbors). Same with the piccolo, but nicer. Practice is the only way. From the outside looking in it might seem like a big bore, but to those of us who really want to hone our craft, it's actually quite fun. It satisfies our jones, our obsessive urges. And after all, it's only practice. It doesn't need to be perfect. Yet.



Which brings us to the noun. I myself learned about practice as a noun in a surprising way. It surprised me, anyway, because it was something I never imagined I could do: I learned about it through meditation. I was one of those people who think that meditation is not for them because they can't sit still for more than two minutes at a stretch, and their minds are in a constant whirl.



It surprised me, when I first started the practice (there, see?) to discover that such a thing was possible. I learned to sit and pay attention to the breath. Just watch it coming in and going out. When the thoughts arrived--and they did, in droves. They still do, ten years later, though perhaps not quite so many, nor quite so frenetic!--I learned not to struggle with them in the vain attempt to send them packing. Not possible. Never happen. But rather to patiently watch them come and go, as they do, and keep bringing the attention back to this breath, now. This one, single, present breath. And, now, this one other breath. And so on. Each one in and for itself, watching the full length in, the full length out.



Well, I don't need to convert you to a meditation practice right now, or offer you basic training in the how-to's. I'll do that another time maybe, for anyone who's interested. For now, enough to say that this particular skill proved an invaluable start-up tool for me in developing the understanding that, for a writer, that over-rated notion of inspiration (thanks, Romantics!) was only a small part of the process, and that practice, practice, practice was by far the more important ingredient.



Practice is not hard. It means quite simply showing up every day and sitting down. It means getting in touch with that part of myself that wants--and needs--to write, and listening quietly for what it has to say. It means a bit of work to develop concentration and focus, bringing the mind back patiently to where I want it each time the mind itself decides to wander off in its own directions, to what it deems to be more diverting enterprises. It means simply deciding each and every day that here is a one-hour or a two-hour stretch--or even just a thirty-minute stretch--when I give myself permission to have nothing else to do but write. And then I start to scribble. (More about scribbling, too, another time.)



Well, that little verbal switch works for me: it's not what I call (shudder!) discipline, it's oh, joy!) practice. It works well enough to suggest you might want to try it for yourself. Just show up, sit down, and get in touch with that part of you that needs to write. Don't forget to breathe. And write.



That's practice. Try it out. And good luck with it.



Peter Clothier is the author of The Real Bush Diaries. Visit his Web site to learn more about his imaginary conversations with President Bush, http://www.peterclothier.com



Article Source: Articles Galore

Why Haven't You Got An Article Directory?

Author: buzz42, 05/08

by Marcus Gardner

With the advent of Jagger, Google's latest update, more than ever people are talking about good content and how important it is to have on any site. Good, relevant content is loved by search engines and visitors alike. Quality content is a powerful tool for Internet marketing and promotion purposes.

Sadly, it seems not everyone; in fact very few have got the message about article marketing, and the fact that you don't have to be the articles author to profit form them, and this in spite of the free advice given by many experienced web masters, that shows that good content and first-rate submission work can grant you a massive publicity online and a growing income.

Even if the search engines change their algorithms, there should be little if any adverse effect on sites with good content, especially if fresh content in the form of well written articles is being added regularly. What many have failed to realise is that the Internet is about nothing but content. Without good, relevant content the Internet would be nothing. In the words of many practiced marketers "content is king".

So how do you make money and satisfy the search engines and your visitors alike? This is where running your own article directory comes into play, it isn't difficult or particularly complicated, and there are some wonderful benefits to having your own article directory:

Your site grows on a daily basis with that all important relevant content.

Every new page is indexed by the search engines, because the content is relevant to the keywords in each article category, your keyword and key phrase score goes up. Especially important in Google.

Your PR will grow over time as the quantity of quality articles on your site increases.

Article directory sites give you targeted traffic; this usually means higher click-throughs on your Adsense and other affiliate links.

No need to worry about constantly changing your content, a few clicks from the mouse in the admin panel is all it takes to add to your content.

Monetizing your site is easy with use of Adsense and any other affiliate scheme you like the look of. Best of all most of theses schemes are FREE to join!

It is plain that the benefits of your own on site article directory far outweigh any disadvantages, So What's to Stop You? Don't know where to start! This is really easy! Visit the nice people at www.articledashboard .com they have a very useful FREE script just for this. It's really easy to install, or if you don't fancy doing it yourself, or are unsure how, they'll install it for a one off of $50. They also provide a nice little PDF file on how best to profit from your new article directory.

Drawbacks!?!
Some say too many articles too quickly could give the search engines the idea that you're a spammer. I have to say I disagree. If your site is a new domain that has never before been registered, then you may find yourself playing in Google's sand box for about three months. However, if your site is older or has been registered before then my personal opinion is that no harm would come, especially when you provide the search engines with what they expect to see - steady growth be that five a week or fifty a day. NO ONE (except the bods at Google) knows the criteria Google uses for sand boxing sites.

On Quality
Use your judgement! After all, you know a piece of garbage when you see one, and it'll do you and your site no good at all publishing garbage.

© 2006 Marcus Gardner Marcus Gardner is a qualified Reflexologist of eleven years standing, who also holds numerous computing qualifications including an HNC in business information technology. Multiis.Com
Submitted with Article Distributor.

Article Source: Free Reprint Articles | ContentFueled.com