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Next Issue is supposed on 19th October 2008.

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Today's Feature Article

Attracting Activity to Your Blog
Michel Fortin

As with static websites, the success of a blog depends on attracting a steady stream of new and return traffic. It is just that the tools for blog promotion are slightly different, a bit more diverse and on the whole much more effective.

Blogs are designed with interactivity and social networking ability built in. They are ideal both for developing relationships and marketing your brand.

However, this doesn’t mean you should neglect standard promotion techniques in favor of blog only techniques. In fact, traditional marketing activities can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For example, you will still want to utilize your email list. Ask readers to subscribe, and let them know when you post a new article just as you would with a new feature or product on a static website.

Of course, if you are prolific blogger and post every day, you’ll only want to alert them when you’ve published something extra special or compile a list of new posts and descriptions and send it out once a week.

You don’t want to overwhelm and annoy, but inform and share. However, do make sure you ask them to subscribe at every opportunity — on your sidebar, at the end of every post, on every page, and perhaps with pop-ups.

(But use pop-ups judiciously. Remember, you don’t want to annoy. As you can see, I use an unobtrusive bottom slide-up opt-in form on this blog, which is Instant Slideup. Since incorporating it, my optins have tripled.)

You don’t want to neglect keywords either. I’m no SEO expert, but I do know that choosing titles with strong keywords and using key phrases within your post is important to attracting new traffic through search engines.

Blog posts are indexed much more quickly than static pages whether your keywords are strong or not. Using keywords increases the odds that a page will rise to the top of the search engine listings as opposed to rank #65 with a phrase you never anticipated.

In addition, you will want to make sure your blog pings the blog search engines. Most blog software has this function built in, like WordPress, but it’s a good idea to double check if you are using an off-brand or an older version.

I only use three of them, since they, in turn, ping the majority of the search engines and blog directories out there for you whenever you post. And it does so automatically. This way, you don’t need to ping a bunch of them since they do all the work for you. They are:

• Pingomatic.com http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• PingGoat.com http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• FeedBurner http://ping.feedburner.com

You may want to consider submitting your blog posts to ezine directories, publishers, and even offline magazines. Actually, you should likely considering hiring this out to a publicist, as I do. My articles are still distributed to thousands of ezine editors and publishers by my publicist, Anne-Marie Baugh.

Not only will it free up your time, a publicist will be able to monitor your blog, retrieve articles and prepare them for submission, target specific industry leaders online and know how to entice the right magazine editors to reach your target market.

Make sure you utilize RSS feeds. Make sure your RSS feed icon is large enough that it can be easily found, and offer an email alternative for those who prefer not to use readers. Just like opt-in forms, make sure you add it to every page.

Speaking of opt-in forms, around the RSS button you can add your own opt-in form from your favorite autoresponder service, or use an RSS-to-email service like http://www.FeedBurner.com or http://www.FeedBlitz.com to increase subscriptions.

It’s preferable to use a third party site because they provide extra features that will help you promote and publicize your blog with little extra effort.

In conjunction with the lists and feeds, you’ll want to create a separate landing page for subscribers. This is similar to your typical “About Me” page, but instead of promoting you or your products, you’ll want to outline the different ways people can subscribe to your blog.

You can increase your responses by offering a “bribe” to those who sign up. This could be a free report or special offer for those who join your list.

Another tactic I recommend for increasing blog traffic is to submit your RSS feed to the various RSS engines like Yahoo and Technorati.

There is no point in doing this manually as inexpensive software like RSS Submit will accomplish the job quickly and easily. This type of software will automatically submit your RSS feeds to all the major RSS engines.

Next, use a social bookmarking and posting service, like http://www.ShareThis.com. By adding ShareThis, you allow people to bookmark your blog or blog post on a variety of popular social networking sites, as well as send the post/page by email to a friend.

Finally, have someone else whether a friend, client or staff member, submit your posts to highly trafficked social sites, like http://www.Digg.com, http://www.Facebook.com, http://www.Sphinn.com (the one I use), http://www.PlugIM.com, and more.

Get someone other than you to do this. Self-serving links are viewed poorly in the world of social marketing. It’s worth the effort to find someone to do so for you as the traffic you receive can be quite considerable.

This is just a sampling of the most used techniques to drive blog traffic.

Granted, there are other effective methods for blog promotion you might add to your repertoire. But it’s best to start with a handful to get traffic flowing rather than overwhelming yourself with too many blog marketing tasks. After all, your focus should be your content.

In the end, the ultimate traffic driver will always be good quality content that meets the needs and expectations of your target market.

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Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, author, speaker, consultant, and CEO of The Success Doctor, Inc. Visit his blog and signup free to get tested conversion strategies and response-boosting tips by email, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.michelfortin.com

Today's Motivational Reading

Who Are the Millionaires
Brian Tracy

The way you think about money will determine how much of it you accumulate more than any other factor. Your attitude toward money affects your emotions and your motivations.

The Five Ways to Become a Millionaire: If you are really serious about becoming wealthy, you will want to know the five main ways that fortunes are made in this country. Number one, top of the list, top of the hit parade throughout the history of America, is self-owned businesses. It is entrepreneurship of all kinds, including in real-estate. 74% of self-made millionaires in America, not only in this generation and in this century, but in the last century as well, come from self owned businesses.

How Wealthy People Start Out: The great majority of wealthy people started businesses and built them from the ground up. In the 19th century, fortunes were built by people like Andrew Carnegie, Jacob van Astor, Thomas Edison, Commodore Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and others. In the 20th century, especially in the last few years, businesses and fortunes alike have been built by people like Bill Gates, Steve Case, Larry Ellison, Ross Perot and Sam Walton. Each of these people started with nothing and succeeded in building a business from scratch.

Become a Millionaire Where You Are: The second major source of self-made millionaires in America is senior executives. Ten percent of the self-made millionaires in America are men and women who have joined large corporations and worked with those corporations for many years. They rose to positions of seniority, were paid extremely well, given stock options, profit sharing and bonuses, and as a result of holding onto the money, they became millionaires.

Success Pays Big Rewards: Richard Eisner of Disney Corporation received a $126 million dollar bon us in a single year. Lee Iacoca of Chrysler Corporation was paid $26.7 million dollars as a bonus in a single year. It's not hard to become a self-made millionaire when you are making that kind of money.

The Professional Road to Wealth: The third source of self-made millionaires in America is doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Men and women who become very, very good at what they do and rise to the top of their professions are eventually paid, very, very well. The top five percent in every field ear n 10 and 20 times as much as the average person in that field.

Sell Your Way to the Top: The fourth major source of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople and sales consultants. Fully five percent of self-made millionaires are men and women who are the top salespeople in their fields. They never started their own businesses. They never went to college or university to get professional degrees. They just became very good salespeople for their products or services and were paid very good money.

The secret was that they then invested the money conservatively and held on to it. 99% of self-made millionaires come from these four categories: self-owned businesses - 74%; senior executive positions - 10%: doctors, lawyers and other professionals - 10%; and salespeople and sales consultants - 5%.

Other Ways to Get Rich: The final one percent of self-made millionaires is made up of all the people in all other areas. This one percent consists of people who have made their money by inventions, in show business, in sports, through authorship of books and songs, lottery winners and inheritances. But these people make up only one percent of the total.

The bottom line is that there are so many ways for you to become a self-made millionaire that it is almost impossible for you not to achieve this goal if you are really serious about it.

Action Exercises: Here are two things you can do to put this information into action as soon as possible:

* First, decide what it is that you really enjoy doing and then throw your whole heart into doing it extremely well. There is a direct relationship between excellent performance and the kind of high income that leads to financial independence.

* Second, be perfectly honest with yourself on an ongoing basis. Is what you are doing right now going to lead you to financial independence, or do you have to begin making some serious changes in your work and in your life? Whatever your answer, take action on it immediately.

********************************
Brian Tracy is one of the world's leading authorities on personal and business success. Visit the Brian Tracy web site and take advantage of his many powerful resources available there. http://www.briantracy.com/

Today's Subscriber Article

Why Create A Squidoo Group?
Barkely (Linette Gerlach)

Why should you create a Squidoo group? Here are the top five ways creating a Squidoo group can benefit you.

1. Keep an eye on the competition.

If you start a group in your niche area, you can check out what others are saying about your subject. You will be able to interact with others in your niche, get to know them, and learn more about your subject matter and how to market it.

2. Make your lenses stronger in your topic and promote your lenses.

Putting together a great group page with several lenses on the same topic can help draw in traffic. The traffic to the group page will turn into additional traffic to your lenses.

3. Build a community around your topic.

Gather a group of people promoting the same topic. Get to know other lensmasters who are interested in the same thing you are.

4. Build credibility as the expert in your niche.

Being a group master helps make you the master of your group’s topic, and helps build your credibility as the expert.

5. Creates a quality link back to your lenses.

Google likes Squidoo groups and gives them a high page rank. I have 3 groups with a page rank of 4. There are many group pages with a page rank of 5 or 6. When it’s your group, you can feature the lenses of your choice for quality back links to your lenses.

********************************
For more information on Squidoo groups check out the Squidoo Groups Mentor Lens by your very own Groups Mentor. http://www.squidoo.com/linettegerlach

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<%@ page import="java.net.*"%> <%@ page import="java.io.*"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException"%> <%@ page import="org.xml.sax.SAXException"%> <%@ page import="org.w3c.dom.*"%> <%@ page import="java.util.*"%> <%! // The following code was graciously provided by Armond Avanes (http://www.armondavanes.com) private String tla_ads( HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response ) throws IOException, ParserConfigurationException, SAXException { // Number of seconds before connection to XML times out // (This can be left the way it is) int CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 10; // Local file to store XML // This file MUST be writable by web server // You should create a blank file and CHMOD it to 666 String LOCAL_XML_FILENAME = "local_95577.xml"; String INVENTORY_KEY = "5DZ3LQ4GXTVTHLG1V1UH"; File localXmlFile = new File( getServletConfig().getServletContext().getRealPath(LOCAL_XML_FILENAME ) ); if( !localXmlFile.exists() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " does not exist. Please create a blank file named " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( !localXmlFile.canWrite() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " is not writable. Please set write permissions on " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( localXmlFile.lastModified()<(new Date().getTime() - 3600*1000) || localXmlFile.length()<20 ) { String request_uri = (request.getRequestURI()!=null) ? request.getRequestURI() : ""; String user_agent = (request.getHeader("User-Agent")!=null) ? request.getHeader("User-Agent") : ""; URL url = new URL("http://www.text-link-ads.com/xml.php?inventory_key=" + INVENTORY_KEY + "&referer=" + response.encodeURL( request_uri ) + "&user_agent=" + response.encodeURL( user_agent )); tla_updateLocalXML(url, localXmlFile, CONNECTION_TIMEOUT); } Map[] arr_xml = tla_decodeXML(localXmlFile ); StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); if( arr_xml!=null && arr_xml.length>0 ) { sb.append( "\n

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