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One particular ways that Uverse helps you save cash is that you are able to get the services that you want bundled up in one at a lower price. ATT Uverse Reviews reveal that instead of dealing with two separate providers for tv and internet you can get them both from ATT for less. If you have a landline telephone you can save even more by bundling all three options. Bundling Up services will save you cash every month and it will also make it a lot simpler for you to keep track of your bills because there’ll only be one. If you have ATT wireless cell telephone as your provider you can even aggregate your cellular phone invoice and your ATT Uverse bill every month so that you can pay with one check. Convenience and a low price make the ATT Uverse package the best value.

There are a good deal of ways that you can lower your monthly cost but your Television and Net services isn’t most like the advisable way to cut back. can give your family umpteen hours of pretty inexpensive amusement in comparison with the price of dining out or going out on average. You can also friends and family over for basketball, movies, and more.

If you’re like most people who start a blog, you initially have a bit of writer’s block. Good news- it will likely go away, and you’ll find yourself thinking of new things to blog about frequently. In fact blogging becomes quite addictive.

This was certainly true of me. When I began blogging, I would often struggle with things to blog about. Now, I have the problem of not having enough time to post on all the things I want to talk about!

Here are a few tips to get you through that initial dry spell until you find your blogging voice.

1) Subscribe to other blog feeds for your industry/target market.

If you have a blog about babies and toddlers, you’ll want to have other similar (preferably high traffic) blogs on your RSS reader. It’s a good way to keep abreast of what’s going on in the collective consciousness of people. Just do a Google search for blog + topics of choice, and you’ll come up with plenty.

Keeping up with other blogs in your niche means that you can link to their posts (and you should always link to a blog that inspires your own post!) and add your own “spin” on the subject.

2) Look at trade magazines and newspapers in your niche

Again, going back to the baby/toddler theme, read parenting magazines. Magazines are a great place to look for inspiration…the articles are mostly short, pithy, “quick fix” and solution oriented (similar to blog posts). They also change to reflect what’s going on in the world and with your target market.

Keeping up with the news is also a good idea…you can find news feeds to add to your RSS reader too. When something is happening in the world that impacts your target market, blog it.

3) Keep a notebook (or file on your desktop) of blog fodder

When a thought or sentence hits you, write it down immediately. These sentences can be lengthened into blog posts (and later lengthened into articles…that’s another ecourse!). The more you do this, the more aware you will become of the unlimited topics you can blog about, even in your niche.

4) Milk Your Content

If you’re publishing a newsletter and write articles, then blog a short intro paragraph along with a link to the rest of the content on your website.

5) Product Reviews

Review products that you’ve tried and books you’ve read that relate to your niche. Anything that would help your blog readers make a decision (and we all need that help in a world with too many choices!) is a good thing.

6) Involve Your Visitors

Your newsletter subscribers and blog readers can be marketing partners and content generators for you!
How? When they email you with a question, ask their permission to post it (along with the answer) on your blog.

May you soon find yourself in the predicament of so many blog posts, so little time!

Carrie Lauth is a work at home Mom of 4 who loves to blog to grow her business. To sign up for a free ecourse with tips from other successful bloggers, visit http://www.business-moms-expo.com/blogging-tips.html

Blogging is really hot and yet many people still have no idea what it is or what it’s for. I usually get one of two responses when I tell people that I recently launched a blog: ‘A what?’ or ‘Great, where can I find it?’

It seems people are either completely aware and involved with blogging or unaware of its existence. Don’t be left behind and miss out on a fabulous opportunity to connect with more potential clients and partners.

Some people have heard about blogs and have a negative impression of them. Yes, there are people who have blogs that consist of nothing more than an on-line diary that documents their ordinary, daily life activities. This is NOT what I am talking about. I want you to use blogging to promote your business!

Highly respected business leaders and writers like Debbie Weil, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Malcolm Gladwell as well as large corporations have blogs, so why not you?

How blogging benefits your business:

* Gain additional exposure to prospective clients and the media

* Drive traffic to your website

* Positions you as an expert and your business as the solution

There are several ways to get involved with blogging. Start where you feel comfortable and choose any, or all, of these options:

1. Start reading interesting blogs

2. Comment on others’ blogs

3. Begin your own blog

READING BLOGS

Think about authors of books you like and see if they have a blog. What about your industry, who are the leaders? Do they have a blog? You can search technorati.com which is a search engine similar to Google which is specifically for blogs.

So how do you know when the blogs you like have new information for you to read? You can download software to your computer although I recommend two other options. One is a web based ‘reader’ which simply entails going to a website (newsgator.com and bloglines.com are examples) and signing up and then selecting blogs you are interested in. The other option is to receive notification of your favorite blogs via e-mail by signing up at each blog you like. You can always do a combination of both.

COMMENTING ON BLOGS

After each entry on a blog there is usually a link at the end that says, you guessed it, ‘comments’ and if you click on it you can type in your thoughts on the topic. Some blogs allow you to post your comments immediately and others preview your comments before posting.

When you write interesting comments to blogs, you gain exposure because you ’sign’ your comment by adding a link to your website, your e-mail address, or to your own blog.

START YOUR OWN BLOG

There is a ton of free information on the internet about how to start a blog so I won’t go into the details here. Trust me, I’m no technical wizard so if I can do it, you can too. You don’t have to design anything, most blog hosts provide a wide selection of templates you can choose from.

You can choose a free blog host like blogger.com or wordpress.com. I chose an inexpensive paid blog host, Typepad.com, because it is important for me to have access to technical support.

It is critical to decide on the focus of your blog and stick to it. I love Typepad.com’s tag line, “Inform. Influence. Inspire.” What could the purpose of your blog be?

Ideas for the focus of your blog:

- Specific aspects of your business that are not covered on your website

- Case studies, tips, or articles

- Trends in your industry

With a blog, it is super easy to add new entries whenever you want. For a blog to be effective it is important to post frequently, at least once a week. Think about it, how often do you update or change the information on your website? Probably not often even if you are able to make changes yourself. Many business owners rely on a webmaster to make changes which makes the process even more complicated.

When your blog is ready, be sure to tell people about it and add it to the blog search engines which are easy to find on the internet. You can also add a link to your blog on your website, e-mail signature, and business cards!

Are you starting to catch the blog fever? I caught it, here’s my blog http://successtipsforlife.typepad.com Don’t delay, get out there and start reading blogs, adding comments to others’ blogs, and hopefully launching a value packed blog for your business in the very near future!

(c) 2006 Stephanie Ward

Life & Business Coach Stephanie Ward helps business owners set their profits on fire! Grab your free monthly profit tips plus a bonus report at: http://www.fireflycoaching.com

No one I’ve ever met is neutral on Wal*Mart. Let me begin by saying that Sam Walton is one of my heroes. He was a humble genius who as a multigazillionaire still rode to work every day in his pickup truck and frequently took his dog with him.

I don’t go to Wal*Mart. I like to buy American where I can and in Wal*Mart I can’t. I’d rather go see my friend Dan Sorrentino at Newtown Hardware for my sundries than some guy I don’t know that I have to walk the length of a football field to find. But I know a lot of people who visit Wal*Mart on a regular basis. FYI, Wal*Mart has an affiliate program through LinkShare that is okay. Wal*Mart also has a blog, called Wal*Mart Facts.

Since it is the largest retail outfit in the world, Wal*Mart has a pretty big target painted on its back. It’s always taking a beating for its employment practices or lack of this or corporate that. Being a PR person for Wal*Mart must be pretty tough. According to the Strategic Public Relations Blog, Wal*Mart is trying to soften its public face. To this end it has hired the venerable public relations firm Edelman in Chicago.

According to the Modern Marketing blog, Edelman and Wal*Mart set up a program they call Action Alley. Action Alley was set up to practice what Modern Marketing calls Outside In marketing:

Traditional marketing has been built around the idea of creating a central set of messages and sending them out into the marketplace.

This can be thought of as an ‘Inside-Out’ approach, where the communications infrastructure required to manage brands and image (cameras, editing suites, media, design & creative personnel) is held inside large organisations and used to distribute information out.

However, as savvy consumers filter out unwanted advertising information using PVRs, adblockers, SPAM filters, RSS feeds, subscriptions and customer communities, the Inside-Out approach is becoming less and less effective.

Not surprisingly, some companies are looking around for new ideas. Open Source Marketing is one idea that people are turning to as they realise that the values behind the Open Source Movement can be applied to industries beyond technology.

The Open Source approach can be described as ‘Outside-In’. It recognises that in a distributed environment a lot of information and content about a company or brand is being produced outside of the organisation by consumers and other stakeholders. And that companies need systems that allow them to react to this information.

It also recognises that frequently this information is more influential than the spiel produced by a company or brand. For example, someone looking to book a hotel will probably place greater value on a customer community such as virtualtourist.com than a hotel website.

Having lived a lot of my life around marketing weenies, I can tell you that outside-in marketing scares the living hell out of marketing people, because it means they’ve lost control of their brand and their message, and they’re not just pulling levers and watching what happens.

Getting back to Wal*Mart, the marketing weenies there perceived that what was being said in the Blogosphere was nibbling away at their brand. They’re probably right. The job of Action Alley is apparently to help -ahem- steer those out in the Blogosphere toward writing more positively about Wal*Mart.

According to the Motley Fool a guy named Brian Pickrell wrote a blog article suggesting that the State of Maryland telling Wal*Mart how much employee health insurance they have to provide might be a bad idea. Without reading the article I would probably agree with him. According to the Fool, his article sounded a lot like a press release created by Edelman.

So the rigamarole seems to be about Wal*Mart’s conspiracy in feeding news stories to influential bloggers to try to influence what they write. Of course they do. So does everyone else, and to say otherwise is either naive or stupid. That is what public relations are all about.

While I was laughing at this whole thing something very, very cool struck me all the hubbub is because a company that earns $30 million a day is trying to influence a bunch of bloggers, rightfully believing that they have a lot of influence on the brand, and wrongly believing that they have any influence over them.

We bloggers aren’t stupid, you know. We may use your marketing tripe propoganda, but the marketing weenies have to understand that the only reason we use it is because we agree with it. And while the purists can squawk, I don’t see any problem with that.

So all of us nobodys as a group can turn a ship the size of Wal*Mart.

Blogs rule.

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

Pinging Your Blog - The 5 “Ws” and the “H?”

What does it mean to Blog and Ping? Sounds like a grammar school game, doesn’t it. Well, after some research, I can now say that I have a fairly good understanding about not only what Pinging means, but also the When, Where, Why and How of Pinging your blog. Oh, and don’t forget the Who!

So, here is what I came up with:

1. What is Pinging?

In 2004, Priyah Shah, a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More, wrote an article about blogging that gave me some insight. She wrote, “There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated your blog so they can come check you out.”

I think that is one of the simplest explanations I have found, so now I share it with you.

2. That obviously answers the questions, “Who should Ping” and “Why should you Ping?”

Do you want to make money? Do you want to increase traffic to your site so that your advertisements can be seen? Do you want your Google Adsense advertisements to be clicked? In short, do want your bottom line to grow?

If you are like me, then you want all of these things. Therefore, you should Ping your Blog!

3. When should you Ping?

To answer that question, first did you know that it was possible to “spam ping?” Well, it is. Spam pinging is pinging your blog(s) many times a day for weeks and weeks just to get traffic to your site. On top of that, it is pinging without updating your blog(s).

Do not do this! It will not help your blog get traffic in the long run and in fact, can hurt your blog stats since many sites you ping to can decide to delete you from their list. It can also hurt others who are trying to get traffic to their sites this way since the ping sites are flooded by spam pingers.

Those thoughts are important since they give the final answer to the question about when is a good time to ping. It is understood by the blog community at large that pinging should be done no more than 2-3 times a day, if that. Most importantly, you should only ping your blog when you have added a fresh post or made significant changes to an old post or your blog site as a whole.

4. Where should you Ping your blog and How?

In order to intelligently write this article, I had to experience what pinging was for myself. Is it difficult? How is it done? You will be happy to know that it is so easy! I found a site that allows you to ping your blog many times over just by filling in your URL, clicking a button and then 1-2-3 your blog is pinged instantly! How do you like that - a single click? It sounds impressive right?

Now if I were you, I would want to know where to find this site. I won’t keep you guessing. It is http://pingomatic.com. Of course, there are many other sites that you can ping your blog to and I’ll list them in another post, but this is one of the best ping sites out there and it is also recommended by the best.

So what are you waiting for? You are now educated on the 5 “Ws” and the “H,” so GO FOR IT!

This is your friendly neighborhood blogger signing out.

Your blogs are a means to make yourself known to zillions of information hungry online audience. But is it always possible for a blogger to trap its writing potential in every subject or area in which he or she writes. The answer is a big No. Though, as a blogger you might be adept in writing collaterally on two subjects, but it is next to impossible to write with equal impact on all the subjects. The basic intention of writing a blog is to do business and make easy bucks, and this is possible if you deliver well and deliver right. You need to get the right content for your blog and keep the interest of the visitors. To achieve this, identify your forte, your area of interests and then strike.

Blogs: How to Make them Interesting and Popular to read

Listed below are some important guidelines that will help you in identifying your strength to write a successful and popular blog:

1.Selection of the topic - Selection of right topics and theme is the most indispensable criterion, to make your blogs successful and popular. Stick to one topic in which you have a basic knowledge. By gradually writing on that topic, you become more knowledgeable, since you do lot of research and thinking on that particular topic. Writing on a well-versed topic is much an easy task then writing on something that you are not fully aware. When you are writing on the subject that you are expert at, you write faster and correctly explain your feelings to the web audience.

2.Flexibility in Your Ideas - Do not make your blogs look monotonous and dull with verbose phrases. Bring variations in your writing. A successful blogger is one who brings maximum variation in the ideas. In this way, you can deliver a great number of well-written blogs with little research and less time. As a creative blogger you can think of bringing any number of variations without changing topics altogether. This will make your blogs appear fresh then ever to your readers. Herein you can feel the pulse of the visitors by referring to the feedback and responses and modify your writing accordingly.

3.Specific Posts for your Blogs - Restricting yourself to your domain enables you to create specific posts. This means you will be having a dedicated audience group that is searching for the topics you write. Increasing keywords in your blogs make it easier for the search engine to deliver just the exact article, as the reader wants to read. Furthermore, by placing ads in your site, specific to your blogs, will help you generate more profits because when a visitor visits your blogs, they are more likely to click on the link of that advertisement. More clicks on ads mean more money and you will earn rich dividends by the blogs.

Keep the aforementioned tips in mind while writing for your blogs. This way, you will be able to write blogs that will earn accolades and profits, besides making your blogs hot property on the Internet.

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Some bloggers will post topics that vary greatly. Other bloggers feel most comfortable when they are posting on a specific topic. The question has always been: which way is best? Studies show that defining your niche creates better blogging. So, using this discovery, it is assumed that it is best to choose one route to take, and stick with it. This can mean that you choose one broad topic and use it to create your entire blog topic list. You will likely get repeated visitors if you are posting on the same subject matter in any case. If you are still not sold however, check out these other explanations for why defining your niche can lead to more successful blogging.

Knowing the Topic

While it can be boring to post on the same topic each day, there is one thing to be said about it. You will certainly know your topic. The more you post on a topic, the more thinking and research you have to do on the topic. When you devote a lot of time to one topic, you will become more and more familiar with it. Therefore, by sticking to one topic, instead of being a “jack of all trades” writer, you will most likely become an “expert” writer on your topic. Knowing a topic well will eventually make the writing process a lot easier. When you know a lot of information on a topic, blog posts will come easy to you. You will soon get to the point where you don’t have to research any longer and can simply use what you know to write. All writers will tell you that at that point, it will take much less time to do your work.

Variations of Your Idea

Although you will be writing on one specific topic idea, you will be creating variations of your idea for your posts. For instance, when your niche is weddings, you can create a post on wedding gowns on one day and a post on wedding bouquets on the next day. The list of wedding topics could go on and on for months or years. There is so many variations you can think of that you can stay within your niche without changing topics altogether. This will allow each blog topic to be fresh and new each day. Brides, grooms, gowns, honeymoon site, all can be part of your blog. Even, how to choose your bridal rings will make interesting blogging. You can visit the various corners of your topic and still stick with your niche.

Creating Specific Posts

When you do go within your niche to create posts, you will be able to write specific posts that will attract a more targeted reader group. This will be great if you are relying on search engines to point people to your site. When you have specific posts that will bring in readers that are looking for topics like yours, your blog will be a success. You can bet that these readers will likely keep coming back to your blog in order to read other posts, which will be great for you as a blogger. If you are planning to ad advertising to your site, having a specific niche will help bring in more money since the ads placed on your site, will also be specific to your blogs. Choose your keywords carefully and add specific words to your blog. This will generate more traffic and can encourage more clicks on the ads placed on your site. With a program such as Google’s Adsense, you can earn money with each click.

So, as you can see, defining your niche is something that you should strongly consider as a blogger. When you jump from topic to topic in your blog, you can confuse readers and never have the opportunity to establish a steady reader group that can sustain your blog. When you do have a niche that you are knowledgeable in, you will see that readers will value your information and opinion and your blog will be a hit! Go ahead and think about a topic that interests you the most. Think about different variations that you can use for more specific topic posts and try them out. You will quickly see that trying this approach can work wonderfully.

In recent years, it’s been pretty obvious that “blogging” (Web + Log = Blog) has simply taken over the internet.

Early blogs were first used by creative (bored?) indivuals, and larger news companies. http://info.cern.ch/ was one of the earliest blogs, followed by NCSA’s “Whats New” and also NetScapes “Whats New” blog. After this point the blogging scene exploded.

What exactly is blogging? Many consider blogging in it’s truest form a type of internet diary. In it’s most pure and basic form its simply a single, scrolling webpages with a few links on the side, and an archive table, and larger, prominent updates in the center of the pages. Users usually post small excerpts about daily life, recent events, or news.

Creative writers often attract groups of people, who will pursue and follow that blog, often posting comments on updates. Some writers write outrageous, offensive things that also attract readers. Some people write about personal experiences, and some just flat out write whatever they want!

RSS, (really simple syndication) also started directly because of blogs. Rather than visit an indivual site over and over again to read the updates and posts, coders started using xml to enable these updates to be available anywhere in the world. In response, RSS has created a whole new chapter in the SEO world, all because of blogging.

Many people have begun to weave affiliate links and even sell there own products through their blogs, relying on their dedicated readerbase to generate huge conversion rates. Programs like WordPress can generate ENTIRE web sites simply by advanced forms of blogging. One of my own sites, www.emoneyreport.com utilizes this program. Instead of bloggin real life experiences, we blog our article updates and program reviews. Very nifty!

Even major search engines are taking part in the blog scene. Most noticably, Google, purchased the site www.blogger.com. Now google controls the largest, most successful blogging site to date! Google indexes and spiders every post created on this site, EVERY day. It’s common practice to create a blog, write small posts and link to your own site through the blog, and doing this you can get spidered and indexed within a day!

We have to ask ourselves, whats next for blogging? Will blogging become the next form of linking? Who knows? All I know for sure is that I like what blogging has become, and that it allows my site to generate income for hundreds of people all over the internet.

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What is a blog? The word is short for weblog. It’s a sort of online log you can create and use to help build interest in your web site.

How do I set up a blog?

Starting a blog is very simple. I recommend www.blogger.com. This site steps you through the process which generally takes only a few minutes and bingo! You have a blog up and running. However, before you go to blogger.com, you might want to determine what you want to name your blog. Since my web site is devoted to a new technology called HD Radio, I named my blog HD Radio Fan. If your web site is devoted to, say, Costa Rica, you might want to name your blog “Living Big in Costa Rica,” or some such.

What do I put on my blog?

You can post any comment to your blog that occurs to you. I currently have 10 posts on my blog, with subjects that range from replies to people who don’t think HD radio will succeed, to the report of a $200 million promotion that will be launched in support of HD radio next year.

The two things you want to do with your blog is attract comments from other people and steer them to your site. Thus, your comments should relate to the content on your site and, in some cases, you might want to be a bit controversial — to attract “rebuttals.”

How do I publicize my blog?
The first thing you should so is put a link on your home page (or one of your most popular pages) to your blog. This will stimulate your visitors to visit your blog and, with luck, tell others about it.

A second way is to generate a PR release announcing the introduction of your blog and then send it to one of the free PR distribution services such as PR Free (www.prfree.com) or PR Leap (www.prleap.com). You can also find newsgroups on topics that relate to your blog and then post news of your blog on them. Finally, you might be able to find blogs that do not compete with your blog but that complement it and post comments designed to get people to your blog.

I find that it takes me only about 10 minutes to post a comment to my blog and even though my blog hasn’t attracted much attention yet, I do believe it will pay off in the long run.

Here’s another good tip. There;s a new technology called HD Radio that enables AM and FM radio stations to broadcast their programs digitally. This is a tremendous technological leap from today’s familiar analog broadcasts. These digital broadcasts provide listeners with radically improved audio quality, more radio channels through multicasting, and new data services. To learn more about this amazing new technology, just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com, to get all the buzz.

Douglas Hanna is a retired marketing executive and the author of numerous articles on HD radio, old time radio and family finances.