Enter the “Related Blogs” plugin, an otherwise somewhat useful plugin that works like a “Related Blog Posts” plugin, except that it will point outside the blog to other blogs in the blogosphere, attempting to fire off a trackback in the other blog’s comments section in the process.

While writing a content-filled post and looking for related blogs using relevant keywords/keyphrases can provide value to the reader and help create an inter-blog conversation, merely throwing in high traffic keywords into the plugin and accompanying that with little or no blog content does not create any value for your readers.

Take a look at these examples:

The example above shows the classical layout of a MFA (made-for-adsense) blog with a Google adsense block, followed by content below. In this case “content” was generated by doing a keyword search for related blogs containing the keywords “affiliate id”, “special thanks” and “CBS affiliate” among others.

In another example:

Attempting to cast the net far wider, this splogger decided to republish content containing the phrase “home business”, “finance”, “education” among others.

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While these methods of “blogging” might get you the odd click and you might think that the claim of making $0.10 a day from 10,000 automated blogs is the path to internet riches, you’d probably be the fool laying his hopes on a pipe dream.

Instead, you’re better off building a blogging business that is based on a solid foundation, can provide consistent and sustainable income.

Some of the ways to achieve this are:

• Ensure that your niche/topic is something that has appeal to internet users: – use tools like Google News, Google Trends, Google Insights – your interest in Imperial Stormtrooper battlesuits, movie props or World War II medals might have a great audience out there.
• Be willing to become an expert in your niche: This might involve shuffling over to the bookstore or library and finding books relevant to your topic and becoming an expert/authority. If you don’t know your subject matter, how’re you going to write about it?
• Find or create a way to monetize your niche: Everything’s a hobby until you find a way to generate income from it – unless you live near a couple of really great soup kitchens. If you can’t generate sufficient income from advertising or affiliate marketing, consider producing your own books, courses, products to serve that niche. In the automative industry, you could find workshops willing to do small scale production runs of your products if you have a ready audience.

For more tips on building a blogging business, you can also check out Secret Blog Weapon.

It’s no surprise that blogs are highly optimized for search engines, tend to be the weapon of choice for linkbait campaigns and are usually the chosen weapon when a single individual (or marketer) decides to take on an airline, supermarket chain, or budget airline.

Add to that the fact that affiliate marketers are also employing it’s flexible architecture to construct landing pages, opt-in forms, affiliate content sites, shopping/shopping comparison sites, coupon sites, customer loyalty sites (plus the occasional or maybe not so occasional affiliate cookie stuffing site) and you’d realize that it’s not just a diarying platform anymore.

In a tweet yesterday, Top Ranking Marketing CEO Lee Odden fired out this tweet “Even thought I’ve said contrary, content published with blog software is technically a blog, but without comments, it’s not social #blogchat”

I sent the reply:

“Does the underlying platform define a blog? Or does blogging refer to the style in which content is published online?”

To which Lee replied:

“I think it’s the style in which content is published. We create newsrooms with blog software but I wouldn’t call them “blogs””

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So while publishing content (however, you may define it) on Blogger/Blogspot or WordPress may have been considered “blogging” before, I see that blogging (along with affiliate marketing) is growing up, we have to dig below the surface, to perform a more detailed analysis to see if it’s defined as a blog.

I’d associate the first generation of blogs (from the 1990s) as more of the “online diary” phase of blogging.

Later, as the medium progressed, editorial, expert comment and analysis crept into the mix. We weren’t limited by the everyday “I had mac and cheese for lunch” blog content (that’s prevalent in the infant media Twitter).

And still later, corporates got into the blogging-Public Relations/undercover sponsored blog side of things.

So blogging’s all grown-up, but does it have anywhere to go?

While marketers, merchants and affiliates wearing all hats from white to black are generating traffic, collecting leads, converting leads into customers and generally transforming WordPress into a transaction platform, still blogging in my opinion, excels as a personal or corporate branding platform.

I’ll be invite a public relations specialist to come on the Friday Podcast soon and one of the key issues will be seeing how blogs and social media are employed in the areas of reputation management and crisis managment.

I’d recently spoke on a panel at a recent conference, and one of the panelists, a crisis management expert, talked about dealing with the media during the recent hijacking of the US-crewed Maersk ship by Somali pirates. Having a communications plan in place, along with the right communication channels to distribute this information, in the age of instant cellphone messaging and Twitter, can make the difference between showing the pro-active response by an individual or a business entity, or it could be a major public relations disaster.

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For more blogging tips, check out the Secret Blog Weapon.

Easier said than done though.

From my research, most podcasters and video bloggers who generate “interesting” (ie not boring) content tend to be clever/witty, use cool background music, broadcast/guerilla-style video effects and transitions, to the point of being Seinfeld-ish (ie being about nothing) in nature.

If anything, the message is a mood or feeling (emotional) in nature, versus featuring hard, intellectual, fact-based content.

While being cute, cool and kooky might capture an audiences attention for 15 seconds, prolonging that audience engagement beyond that period, can be a challenge.

More importantly, building a brand or cult of personality can be similar to a celebrity endorsement, like a Britney Spears endoring Pepsi type of campaign. However, how far can this go?

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On the other hand, strongly fact-based content, like marketing white papers, tend to be dry, and keeping the audience’s attention can be a challenge too. Appealing to the head, but not the heart, can be a mistake, because most buying decisions, whether buying a new iPod, or signing up for a Acai or Reservatrol trial is often made on the basis of hope…or dispair.

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With blogging providing a channel for any marketer to publish information, it’s largely a self-regulated medium – barring cease and desist letter, you’re free to publish any content, free of editorial control.

If anything, it’s a democratic medium, because the audience “votes” with their feet, whether to come back for a return visit, or write you off as irrelevant.

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So back to the original question – is it possible to be both informative and engaging/entertaining? While this will come naturally for a rare few bloggers, for others it can still be achieved, however, it’d take more effort to each this goal.

Studying role models and more importantly, analyzing how their content is developed and presented will move you further along the learning curve.

Some of the characteristics of successful bloggers:

• Writing in a 1st person style, creating a “you are there” experience
• Engaging the reader fully on a “heart and mind” level
• Creating a reader community and interacting with them

For more tips on using blogging as a branding and monetization channel, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

Choice of niche:

Obviously an important choice which will affect your daily/weekly routine for at least the next couple of months. It’s never a good idea to go into a vertical/industry solely by the perceived high payouts or bonuses you’re being offered.

Choosing a niche based on your affinity and interest seems to work for me, and I don’t feel that passing up on a number of “lucrative” niches has hurt me.

Working the Grind

Any vertical will have a period of “grinding” or what gamers refer to a period where you have to go through some repetitive, potentially painful effort. Any site will require more than its share of TLC, especially in its early stages. If you’ve outsourced help or an employee to take care of this mundane stuff, it helps, else it’s about 5-10 hours of setup and optimization if you choose to do it yourself.

With that, here’re an accelerated blueprint to get your niche site up.

Competitive Analysis:

Key in some general keywords/keyphrases specific to your niche, take a look at competitors and affiliates through the search engine results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other tier-2 search engines. Also take a look at results from Ask.com, Wikipedia, YouTube, Squidoo, Hubpages to get a comprehensive view of the landscape.

Use tools like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast to assess these sites and their site authority.

Keyword Research:

While keyword spy tools are all the rage, it’s a little too tempting (and could be a potential downfall) to believe that SpyFu, Keyword Spy and other tools will “do all the work” for you.

Instead, going to a back-to-basics approach with free tools like Google Trends, the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, Microsoft AdLab, will give you insights not just into the keywords, but the searchers intent.

Do realize that search volume does not always correlate to buying intent. Someone searching for “Rhianna gossip” may not be as keen on “Rhianna ringtones” and making that mistake can be costly.

Site Setup and Optimization:

WordPress still continues to be my CMS (content management system) / website builder of choice. HTML editors require too much effort to build stuff, and other CMSes require too much time to configure and aren’t as search engine-visible.

The current trend as I’ve seen is moving away from flashy, resource-heavy sites and moving towards functional websites with easy navigation and ease-of-use.

Go for a simple 2- or 3-column blog template and if you can stump up the budget, Thesis is a good option. (read my product review)

Creating and publishing content on a regular schedule helps, especially if it’s geared towards human readers, rather than merely keyword-rich content.

Take note that you will need to work through the grind, even if you’re using PPC, but eventually it will pay dividends.

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If you’d like to access some blog marketing strategies, you might like to check out my Secret Blog Weapon system.

Having played with a WP 2.7.1 install, it seems to chug along slower compared to it’s 2.5.1 predecessor, and hopefully this doesn’t signal a path down the bloatware route, even if it comes with lots of shiny bells and whistles, compared to before.

WordPress has become much easier to use now for the most part, with several functions accessible behind the browse-based point-and-click interface. In the past you had to FTP files down, edit them with a text editor and upload them, or use the clunky “theme editor” function and edit the text from there.

I started out in 1997 writing HTML on a text editor and created tables writing raw table, tr,td,/td,/tr, /table tags. I later progressed on to using WYSIWYG text editors and software like XSite Pro. These days I do almost everything exclusively with WordPress only or in tandem with other software like vBulletin forum software, Aweber email autoresponder software, Joomla or some of the new CMSes I’ve been working with recently.

HTML editors have gone to the scrapheap for me. That’s not to say that WordPress is the final word in creating new niche affiliate sites though.

Here is my wishlist:

Here are a couple of things that WordPress has done well:

• Spam control: Akismet works hard to keep trackback spam, comment spam out of the woodwork. I use a couple more for good measure so very little spam is sitting in the moderation basket each day.
• Tagging: Keywords and tags help readers find relevant content, especially with the millions of blogs floating in the blogosphere. They’re one step further towards relevant and have made older plugins like Tag Warrior float into lesser prominence.
• Native embedding of video and other embed code: While you had to jump through hoops to place a YouTube video in a blog post, the process is a pretty seamless copy-and-paste job now.

Here are a couple of things that would help WordPress become a more complete solution:

• Higher SEO intelligence: Er, who in their right mind would use a permalink structure like domainname.com/?p=284 ? To have to toggle it to a date is a slightly better with your postname showing. But I think more could be done. Recommendation: the All-In-One SEO pack plugin. Another, XML sitemaps (shouldn’t this be built into WordPress?).
• Caching to HTML or static files: WordPress is a set of PHP (a programming language) scripts and these use more computing power than most HTML pages or static pages. Shouldn’t something like Super Cache be part of the standard plugins? Lowering your server overhead is a good practise, rather than wait till you encounter server slowdowns.
• More Multimedia: With audio and video content becoming more prevalent (there was only one audio blog listed in many blog directories when I started, now there are thousands), shouldn’t the functions provided by plugins like PodPress become part of the standard issue plugins?
• More Talk: This is a weird one. With spambots actively harvest email from sites, it’s weird that blogs don’t come with a contact form or email mailto: form. Are you only supposed to talk to readers in your comments?

It’ll be interesting to see what the new versions of WordPress bring (hopefully they make it run more speedily.

I doubt that Twitter will be driving blogging out of business any day soon, and with the trend towards WordPress as a landing page, or as the building block for niche sites, its popularity looks set only to increase.

Maybe someone can take a snapshot of the proportion of WordPress sites compared to total websites today and see how much it increases a year from today.

If you’re serious about using WordPress for branding yourself, or creating affiliate/niche sites, you should also check out the Thesis WP theme (see my product review) and also the Secret Blog Weapon training.

Is this an influence of the minimalist style micro-blogging platforms like Twitter? It’s hard to say, but having a simple, yet intuitive design will give blog visitors easier access to your content and reduce the distraction that a cluttered blog template can create.

Chris’ Thesis WordPress template has been around since last year, so it’s not exactly a new kid on the block. In that time, it’s made its way on a number of blogs, especially based on its strengths.

I’d been looking for a clean and SEO-optimized template for use on a number of new content sites I’m in the process of developing and after reading a Thesis review by Rae Hoffman AKA SugarRae, it sealed the deal for me.

Here’s what the default installation looks like:

As you can see, it consists of a text area on the left and a prominent “multimedia box” in the top right, with 2 text columns below.

This 3 column design gives you flexibility in deciding how you’d like to layout your blog elements.

One key is the multimedia box allows you to display graphics, ads, an opt-in box, a product shot, text box, or anything that fits within its dimensions easily.

I think the trend toward simplicity and ease-of-use in web design and blogging will continue to be a theme, as sites move away from a Swiss Army Knife “all-in-one” information overload approach with 50 hyperlinks on a page to something that’s easily accessible, especially as users more familiar with the simple user interfaces found on MySpace and Facebook discover there’s a whole world beyond the walled gardens of the social networks.

Experienced bloggers will be familiar with the process of logging into the WordPress theme editor and hacking the PHP code to insert handwritten snatches of code to signal how the search engines should display the title tag and content from the blog post.

If you choose to, that code hacking aspect of blogging can be a thing of the past, leaving you to focus on the core business of writing and publishing content (hopefully you’re having fun in the process). With a series of user interfaces:

You’re left to tick option boxes and type in the free text area how you like the title tags to appear. This used to be a process involving rewrite the PHP command and hoping you didn’t destroy your blog in the process.

Although you can use further SEO add-ons like the SEO Title Tag and All-In-One SEO Pack plugins, you can probably make do with Thesis’ built-in SEO functionality.

Likewise, with Thesis’ server requirements of PHP 5 installed on your webhost account and with a platform of WordPress version 2.7 to operate at an optimal level, you will already have access to WordPress’ newer features.

Similarly where editing the element like the Multimedia box (the free display area in the top right corner) used to involve extensive hacking, testing (and maybe a little weeping), it’s now easily managed with a series of check boxes and pull down menus:

And likewise, insert analytics packages like Google Analytics or 3rd party packages is a matter of pasting the tracking code in the stats boxes:

While Thesis’ enhancements are not exactly earth shattering because an experienced code could probably add or modify WordPress’ raw PHP code, the advantage of Thesis is that you don’t have to play with the code (unless you like to), it’s just a mouseclick away.

Also, having to spend less time messing around with PHP, means you will have more time to promote your offers and optimize your marketing campaigns.

Pros: Easy to use, especially for beginners. Intuitive option panel layout, built-in SEO functions so your blog gets indexed more effectively. Multimedia box gives you adequate room to publish resource links, images, videos, etc easily.

Cons: If you use your blogging software in an advanced manner, eg: membership site, forum, you will need to insert your custom code into the template, or hire a coder. Likewise, if you’ve heavily customized your blog, you will need to some effort to transition over to Thesis (These issues will likely only affect more experienced/advanced bloggers anyway).

Currently, Thesis is available in 2 versions:

• Personal option (usable on 1 blog): $87
• Developer option (unlimited sites, plus you can remove attribution in the footer) $164

There is also an option to upgrade from the personal to the developer version if you decide to later.

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Since I’m planning to roll out Thesis on at least 5 new blogs, it just made sense to get the developer version.

Your purchase also comes with lifetime upgrades (Chris’ lifetime, not yours…)

With the flexibility to use Thesis as a blog or a landing page template, what’s not to like?

-> Check out Thesis now!

• If it happens once, it’s an accident.
• If it happens twice, it’s a coincidence.
• If it happens three times, you have a “trend” story on your hands.

So 3 prominent bloggers quitting the scene within a period of 1-2 years = trend?

The one thing about the “golden rule” was that it generally applied to the brick-and-mortar context, not as much when you’re talking about 3 or more bloggers out of the hundreds of millions of blogs out there.

Statistically, even 100 top bloggers out of a universe of 100 million blogs would be 1 / 1,000,000. In decimal points that would be 0.000001% of the blogging population.

So wondering if “blogging is dead” is akin to wondering if fixed-line telephones are dead or if the fax machine is dead. Nice linkbait, but I don’t think there’s much substance or value to that argument.

Jason Lee Miller notes in his WebProNews piece that fame (or the price of it) might be the cause of the backlash against TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Dan Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs et al.

Valleywag also notes that Dan scored a book deal out of his Fake Steve Jobs gig. I don’t know about you, but posting 10-20 posts a day on a blog can only be justified against the reward of a book deal or other financially rewarding gig.

In the case of Mike Arrington, TechCrunch has gained sufficient reader critical mass in recent years to merit him taking a step back from the death threats and gobs of spittle to the face. With the goal accomplished, there’s no necessity to take the next bullet (or wad of spit).

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My opinion is that each of the A-Listers had an outcome in mind, whether it was a book deal, a movie deal, being able to build up advertising rates to $32,500 per month.

If anything, it was more “mission accomplished” than “i give up”.

And for the other bloggers out there who are prone to engage in a bout of “should I continue blogging?” type navel-gazing, it might be a sign that you’re just not serious enough about this to have your effort questioned at every turn.

Back to work.

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For ideas and strategies about managing your blogging efforts as a business, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

Since then, he’s published more posts related to PPC traffic generation and CPA affiliate marketing. If you’ll read some of his posts like his Questions and Answers post:

His reply to the question about what he should have known as an internet marketer starting out is frank and uncensored: “That 99% of marketers writing ebooks to sell to other marketers are nothing but forum slime who copy other peopleâ€s ideas and steal the glory to make a penny. Had I known that when I started I would not have wasted a shitload of money”

Instead, the foundation of how he determines what works and what doesn’t isn’t by reading an ebook, but by testing it out. And it’s not just posts about how he made big money either. In an update to his testing, he removed the entrecard and scratchback blog widgets because they weren’t performing.

One major lessons that internet marketers wanting to be successful from their efforts is to continually research, test, analyze new campaigns and products and services. “Failing” once does not put you out of the game.

The other point is that blogging about the experience (good or bad), helps you verbalize the lessons learned, and lock-in the success or failures (so you can repeat or do not repeat the experience as appropriate).

Since then, Ruck has gone on to set up Convert2Media, which focus on CPA affiliate offers. I’ve been fortunate to have one of his partners, Steve Howe, as my affiliate manager and we’re currently developing and testing new campaigns.

But back to CashTactics. With the possibility of selling the blog out of the picture, Ruck instead chose to pass the blog to his friend Kris Trujillo (right) (whom I interviewed a couple of weeks back for the Friday Podcast).

Kris is no slacker either, as a SEO consultant with his outfit Trujillo Marketing. In addition, he’s got a strong background using social networks for his traffic generation efforts.

CashTactics still offers a set of free reports, which include topics focused on Yahoo! Answers, article submission and list building (together with a number of free tools).

Kris is not standing still though, he’s recently recruited PPC affiliate marketer Andrew Payne to kick off a multi-part PPC case study on the blog.

From a branding standpoint, it’s smart for CashTactics to branch in 2 directions, one content stream focusing on PPC, while Kris leverages his SEO background to pump out content like how to get a PR6 backlink from the high traffic monster Apple.com and tips on copywriting and adding video to your pages.

With constant promotion via contests and promotion activities, the blog sets to grow, even as it’s changed hands. More importantly, the blog has seen a smooth transition from Ruck to Kris and the brand continues to see healthy growth.

Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”

That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).

What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.

I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?

If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?

Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?

Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.

Even if the blogger doesn’t wipe the comment off with a click of the “delete” button, who’s to say that any reader will click on your link, even if the anchor text is “SoCal Beach Bunny”?

Social media is a double-edged sword, you can easily establish yourself as the leader in your space through the power of blogging and participation in community sites and forums.

At the same time, if you are facing a serious credibility challenge, web 2.0 can be equally ruthless in exposing every blemish, scar and imperfection in your “social media” campaign.

Although I don’t fully agree with Jason Calacanis’ arguments that the Internet is being polluted with affiliate spam, I do think of my blog as my virtual home and like to “curate” or censor out the junk that doesn’t add value to the blog reading experience.

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For ideas on building a sucessful blog-based business, check out my Secret Blog Weapon program.

Though it’s a social medium, success in Web 2.0 is ultimately about building a long-term relationship (personal or business) with your readers and your community. And that’s going to pay handsome dividends.

Anything else and you’re just fooling around.

From self-professed “Law of Attraction coaches”, to being able to gain mastery over the secrets of life, it just seems so easy and just a $19.95 shipping and handling charge away.

The essence of the Law of Attraction, though it seems somewhat hokey and new age-ish especially after being given the quasi- or even pseudo-scientific spin by para-scientents (ie: not quite “official” scientists) has its basis in books like Wallace D Wattles “The Science of Getting Rich” and Napolean Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” (although Napolean died poor…).

The major problem I have with the whole “Law of Attraction” movement is its emphasis on “thinking” and somehow attracting wealth, happiness or whatever you want to attract to you.

If it smells a little like the internet wealth programs which promise to make you untold riches while you sleep, or those weight loss programs which help you lose weight while you sleep or watch TV, you’re not too far wrong.

The fact is that success at anything – whether it’s closing a major business deal, building a successful internet business, or forming a relationship with a significant other – all require effort, and learning. There’s no 300 page PDF which will guarantee you success.

If that were so, we’d all be internet millionaires within 30 days of having started, wouldn’t we.

Here’s where I think the Law of Attraction is useful – as a starting point.

If you have a mental picture of where you want to be, who you want to be, what you want to be, you’ve taken the first step in becoming success. This is also where the heavy lifting will beging.

I get emails from aspiring bloggers who write:

“I like your blog, and I want to make a successful living from my blogging. I’ve spend hundreds of dollars buying books on blogging (ebooks and physical books), and I started a blog, but I haven’t been successful yet. Help!”

With some further probing, I find that they’ve been blogging a total of 3 weeks and have a trickle of traffic coming to their blog, and generated a total of $0.27 from Google AdSense after publishing a total of 5 blog posts.

Your actions determine your results.

Though the wishful thinking aspect of the law of attraction can give you a temporary bump in your motivation and maybe even spur you to write a blog post, or two, or three, it’s the ability to continue taking consistent, focused action that will give you results.

It’s one of the reasons why I spend a considerable amount of time developing the blog training system which I launched last month, and for a number of the motivated new and intermediate level internet marketers out there who’re looking for a system to follow and scale up their internet income, the Secret Blog Weapon could hold the “The Secret” to your internet marketing success.

While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the “success” of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.

A more significant statistic is to determine your average revenue per unit (ARPU) or income earned per visitor.

For example, if you have 100,000 visitors and your blog earnings are $5,000 and you compare it against a smaller blog with 35,000 visitors and earnings of $4,000. Which is better?

Let’s skip the superficials $5,000 versus $4,000 for the moment and look at ARPU. For the large blog, ARPU is $5,000 divided by 100,000 or 5 cents per visitor, while the smaller blog’s ARPU is 11.4 cents.

The smaller blog is twice as effective at generating income as the large blog and though it trails the large blog in terms of total readership, I’ll go one step further to say that assuming you’re not a casual or hobby blogger and you’re blogging as a business, the end goal should be income generation, rather than the “generating eyeballs/impressions” game that was prevalent in year 2000 with dotcom mania.

If anything, sustainable blogs are going back-to-basics, focusing on a solid business foundation and continuous growth – all supported by a sensible business model and sustainable income generation.

If the pieces are in place, you have the makings of a profitable blog business.

For more blogging strategies and tips, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

In a recent blog post, he mentioned that Revolution arose out of a site design which had been rejected by a real estate client.

Good thing too, because it’s gone on to be one of the most popular magazine-style WordPress templates.

I invited Brian on to the Friday Podcast and we talked about:

• How he got started in online marketing 2 years ago
• Balancing blog design and blog usability to build user stickiness
• How you can test out new templates on your blog before you go live with them
• Tips on becoming more efficient with your blog
• Shifting his business model from a paid premium blog template now to an open source business model in November

Check out the podcast below:

Be sure to check out:

• Brian’s personal blog
• Revolution blog theme website

Important note: The Revolution themes will only be available till Oct 31st, so you should get them before they’re taken off the market.

In the “chatterspace” of micro-blogging platforms like twitter, it’s not uncommon to see posts like “Feeling hungry. Going to get a burger” or “Just picked a bunch of lint from my belly button. Yuck!”. The question is, does this help or hurt your brand?

Mike alluded platforms like Twitter to the reality show “Big Brother” where “voting is done by people at home, people at home typically vote out all those who don’t say much, don’t swear, don’t take enemies etc. Those type of people typically end up being the first to leave”

As the current situation stands, the rabble rousers sometimes do end up with the most number of twitter followers by virtue of the “freakshow factor”.

Being able to garner a following because you’re excellent at stirring up controversy may bring the crowds, but are you much better than merely winning the title of the “Rodney Dangerfield of Microblogging” together with its accompanying “I can’t get no respect” title?

Additionally, Mike adds that most Twitter users see the channel as entertainment, rather than a bona fide communication tool, he goes on to say “if you compare this to Twitter, people want to follow those that will create controversy, swear, say stupid things, post a crazy video here and there, much more than they want to follow professionals who are going to post nothing but quality content”.

So how do you account for the fact that the most popular National Geographic program has 1% of the ratings of a Big Brother? It has to do with the audience profile and the program format.

Survivor: Gabon

Take the winners of the Survivor reality show, they’re usually quiet, fly-under-the-radar, non-controversial, diplomatic individuals. This probably wouldn’t fly in either Big Brother or Twitter. Being subtle or quiet doesn’t work the excitement factor.

Donald Trump’s The Apprentice

If you’re hoping to pick up business lessons from reality TV (hopefully it’s supplement other forms of learning!), Donald Trump’s The Apprentice model is a close analogy to business life. In Apprentice, in order to win you need to be a hustler. You need to lead by example, avoid acquiring enemies and win the respect of both your team members and your boss.

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Microblogging now has a lot of similarities with blogging when it first became popular, with bloggers initially writing about what they had for lunch or how much they spent on a shopping trip (some still do this).

But as the medium evolves, I’m sure like blogging, we can expect to see the content on microblogging platforms get more sophisticated.

Jeremy Palmer sent a twitter update that often discussed “Duplicate content penalty” has been refuted by Google in a recent webmaster central blog post.

So the word from big G! is:

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you weren’t already aware, a wordpress blog creates “duplicate content” just because of the way the pages are structured.

A “domain-name/page-1/” and “domain-name.com/blogging/2008/09/10/todays-post.html” might contain the same content. Unless you’re willing to spend a little time setting “no follow” tags on sections on your blog, you are already publishing duplicate content on the web.

I’m not overly disturbed that I might be “slapped” down by the search engines for this duplicate content and think the time could be better spent on growing my business instead.

Where a blog can stand out is to provide “value” to the content publishing process.

It’s been mentioned before that a genuine review (rather than scraped/republished content from other sites) will generate more sales, because it blends the visitors needs for accurate and useful information, together with your attempt to monetize the site.

Secondly, moving from a purely automated/mechanical approach to SEO and linkbuilding to a social traffic-based approach can yield great dividends for your business.

Blogs, in particular, are a great way for existing businesses to ramp up their marketing efforts and for new marketers to get their foot in the door.

For more resources, check out the Secret Blog Weapon.

In the last 2 years, since I’ve been growing my internet business, two key steps:

1) posting quality content and

2) achieving authority status in the niches I operate

have played a key part of my success.

Successful, long-term blogging goes beyond just harvesting the most popular and/or profitable tools from keyword tools and bashing out keyword-dense content.

It should also encompass planning skills and management skills to be able to publish original, quality content a year, two years or longer down the road.

What most marketers may not realize is that following a step-by-step system can greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to blog prodictively and effectively.

The Secret Blog Weapon coaching program I’m launching today is a result of more than a year’s worth of research into the most relevant topics and techniques new and experienced bloggers need to have at their fingertips, together with a system designed to either kickstart your blogging efforts or bring them to a new level.

What I’ve done my best to achieve has been to:

• Identify critical skills that bloggers need to possess (and develop them if they don’t already have them)
• Organize your blog effort around a proven system to maxmimize your results
• Create a system to build a brand and effectively use this brand to build your business

You can find more details about this comprehensive 6-month program at: SecretBlogWeapon.com