Today anyone who has writing ability or is dreaming to be a writer has written a blog in the net. There are blog soft wares that are simple and easy to use and a technically inclined and challenged individuals can easily acquire a blog online.

For some individuals, blogs are their projects of every day living, as they talk about their daily episodes as well as make tribute to friends and family. Furthermore, blogs assume a profound meaning written to compose and assemble political statements, endorse a product, supply information on research, and even offer tutorials. Any subject that are of your interests, you can be sure that someone has written a blog about it.

Blogs are now being written by musicians, politicians, sports figures, novelists, newscasters as well as other known figures. It is this blog fever that has raised controversy. The fact that anyone can compose and regarding any subject matter under the sun, complaints about certain write-ups are an issue. In a lot of blogs, names are being mentioned; do bear in mind that although you are entitled to write anything that interests you in a blog, you have to be very careful and take in a lot of responsibility. Do not make any statements which can become controversial; or else, be very prepared.

Why a Blog?

1. For personal acquaintances, relationships and hobby. A person can write a blog about his daily activities, what抯 going on with his life as his way of telling his family and friends the things that goes on in his life. Likewise, one may also write a blog just so he can express what he feels about himself, or about a certain subject matter that is of interest to him.

2. Topical. Some blogs are committed to a precise topic, like computer hardware or politics. These are frequently read like magazines.

3. For marketing. Corporations are too, into blogging; when well written and implemented, this kind of blog can be a powerful instrument for business communications, forming eagerness and anticipation regarding their products and services offered, or used as tool within the company, keeping employees well informed about company issues and news.

Why someone else’’s software?

A lot of Web designer and creators will laugh at the belief and idea of utilizing the software of someone else. This is can be correct especially when each software greatly differs from the particular requirements that a client may have. Yet on the other hand, when it refers to a Weblog software, there is no reason for apprehension in the use of a package that is pre-written, as most packages were developed through years of study; not just knocked together over a couple of days.

In addition, one may study its feature set. For a developer, it would take a lot of time and effort to write and compose from 搉othing at all?every single feature in the Weblog software packages of today. For most people, a blog is there for the main reason that chooses to publish or make known your literature and texts on the Web, so you want to spend your time more on writing than coding. thanks

One would think that registering a domain is the first step when setting up your website. This is not quite true. Hopefully you had done your research first to identify your niche keywords, in other words, the primary key terms that people are looking for in relation to your business.

Your domain name should reflect what your site or your business is about. It should be descriptive and easy to remember. If you can register your domain name by using your best niche keyword you will also score a few points in trying to get your site high up in the search engine rankings.

Just note, however, that while this was especially true a couple of years ago, the prevalence of garbage made-for-adsense type of sites to try and register a domain name with keywords in have led to this factor being overused and abused. Search engines are wising up to the fact that a domain name like www.red-widgets-blue-widgets-purple-widgets-cheap-widgets.com might not really be a real business and you should therefore be careful not to STUFF your domain name with keywords.

Here are some tips to choosing a good domain name:

1) If your company has a distinctive name that you use in your marketing campaigns, and if your company is well known among your customers it is best to try and register your company name as your domain name. For example, it will be better for Standard Bank to register standardbank.co.za as opposed to bankingservices.co.za. Branding yourself as a company that provides a specific service is very important.

2) But if your company does not have such a strongly branded presence in the market, or if you are offering a product or service that you specifically want to market through the internet without even HAVING a company, then a descriptive name might be a better option (e.g. www.health-products.co.za)

3) Hyphens are easier to read in print, are easier to ”understand” by the search engines (remember that a key linking strategy is to have text links contain your targeted keywords. If your domain name is legible to search engines and it is used to link to your site, you score some points since your keywords are already contained in your domain name), and gives you more choice. The negatives about hyphens are that they are difficult for people to hear! You will probably have difficulty in spelling out your domain name over the phone or in conversation when it contains hyphens.

It is also true to say that a name without the hyphens are also seen as being more professional (often the hyphenated name is seen as being a bit johnny-come-lately as well as spammy due to the reasons mentioned above). Search engines are also getting more and more proficient in understanding text that are embedded within domain names (even without the hyphens) and using a hyphenated site purely so that the search engines can understand them is probably not necessary these days.

4) But a good piece of advice is that when you register a domain name is to register as many variants (with hyphens as well as without hyphens) and as many domain extensions (.com, .net, .info, .biz) as you can afford. Registering domain names are really not that expensive and you will be protecting the investment into your company and your website brand. Remember that there are unscrupulous domain squatters (typo squatters) out there that will register variants of your domain name to either try and sell it back to you at a high cost, or to try and capture some of your traffic.

5) It is extremely difficult to come up with a good .com domain name these days. Most good domain names have been taken already. Here is a good resource page that contains a list of language tools that you can use to try and mix and match words or portions of words to come up with a good domain name. http://marcusvorwaller.com/blog/archives/2005/08/09/how-to-find-a-great-domain-name/

6) If you are located in a country other than the United States, always try and register your domain name with your local Top Level Domain extension (e.g. .co.uk, .co.za) since the local version of Google will give preference to names with extensions matching your own country.

7) Always try and register your domain with an independent registrar and NOT with your hosting provider. If you ever want to move your website to another hosting provider, it will just be easier to do it if your domain name registrar is also not your hosting provider. You might find it more difficult to get your website away from a bad hosting provider if they have control over your domain name as well.

Wikipedia defines WordPress as a web publishing system (a.k.a. content management system) written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is used to manage frequently-updated Web content, especially Weblogs. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is available free of charge.

If you are freaked out by the technical jargon don抰 be. If you have your own web hosting account with mysql access you can easily install the software on your server or have a php programmer install it.

The software is free and can be accessed at http://wordpress.org The benefits of have the software hosted on your server include link popularity. Because you will be promoting a blog with a link back to your original domain you will get backlinks. The downside is managing the software on your hosting account which can cause added stress and take some time to maintain.

If you are not at all technical you can sign up with several free wordpress hosting services like http://freedesktopads.com that will host the software on their server. All you need to do is log in with a username and password to use the service. You will not receive backlinks to your direct domain but you will create backlinks to the blog you are working on. One other issue is the host can pull the plug on your blog at any time so be sure to have some back up of the material at least if you are forced to move.

Blogs can target specific keywords for Search Engine Optimization just as traditional web pages can. The benefit of article marketing versus a web page is content pure and simple. The blog is an ongoing listing of your articles one right after the other. If your blog is full of articles on one particular niche you are likely to use the same keywords throughout various articles. Your blog will be full of good information with keywords scattered through it appropriately instead of concentrated for SEO benefit.

Your blog can all be distributed through RSS feeds. Think of an RSS feed like an email list. If you have a number of people who find your blog worth while they will add it to their feed service. When your blog gets updated your RSS feed will send it out to your subscribers. How cool would it be to have your blog feed to thousands of RSS feeders and all you need to do is add content.

Word press makes it really easy to tag your blog. Tagging a blog means that your keywords are tagged and picked up by popular pinging services like technoratti. A tagged blog is more readily available for users searching for your particular content. Tagging a wordpress blog is extremely simple. Create categories based on your keywords. When you publish your articles on your blogs select the specific categories that related to your articles. As you create more keyword rich content create more categories. You will see a solid spike in traffic based on tagging alone.

Get instant traffic to your blog with a pinging service. Pinging is the act of letting other content sites know you have new information on your blog. Ping at http://pingoat.com for sure. Every time you update your blog use the ping service. Pingoat pings top notch services like technorati. You can also submit your blog to hundreds of blog directories like http://www.blogcatalog.com

Blogs are beneficial because they are easy to update, they can keyword rich and are easily announced to the world. The content should be kept fresh and up to date to keep people coming back for more. Use your blog to direct traffic to other sites, monetize it with Google Adsense or Clickbank products.

You”ve got your web server running, and you”re ready to dive headfirst into creating your first site or three. How should you set them up? There are a few neat tricks you can do with IIS involving host headers and custom error pages. In this article, I”ll describe to you in detail how to use these features to set up dynamic websites that will respond to any domain name, as well as how to set up cystom dynamic file structures that let you name your pages in whatever manner you wish (which is extremely useful for SEO).

I”ll assume you already know how to set up a basic web site in the IIS console (right-click, New Site, yadda yadda). If you haven”t made a folder for and created a basic site, do that now so we”ll have something to play with. Right-click on it once you”ve created it and go to Properties, then click the Advanced button on the first tab that comes up. This is where you define host headers for your website, what domain names the website should respond to.

If you create an entry for Port 80, but leave the Host Header Name field blank, then IIS will use this site to respond to all requests that the Web Server receives, regardless of the domain! You can then have one site respond to any number of domains or subdomains, and they could even be determined and handled dynamically by the server script language.

Hit OK or cancel to leave the host header window, and on the main properties window go to the Custom Errors tab. Scroll down in the list until you see 404. This is the configuration setting for this website for how IIS responds to requests for pages that do not exist. If you open up the properties of the 404 entry, you can change the Message Type setting to be \”URL\”, and where it says File you can type in \”/404.asp\” (without the quotes).

Now whenever someone requests a page that doesn”t exist at this website, say \”www.yourdomain.com/articles/\”, instead of returning the normal 404 error screen (\”page not found\”), it will process the \”/404.asp\” file on your website. That file can then, according to whatever you write the script to do, look in your database for an article with the name of the file that was requested, for example. Thus all of your articles, news, and other dynamic content pages, can also have dynamic URLs — not dynamic in the sense that they are changing, but in the sense that it doesn”t matter what the URL is. You can optimize it completely for SEO, such as \”http://www.yourdomain.com/Article-Keywords-Info/\”.

Of course, your web server will still register that as a 404 hit, but who cares. You can also copy the 404b.htm file from the default directory (look at another web site’’s setting in IIS to get the default file name and location) to your website root, and then in the dynamic 404.asp file, if the article name can”t be found, you can then redirect the user back to the 404b.htm original error page. Perfect!

What is digital scrapbooking? Well, it is basically taking the art of scrapbooking onto your computer! There are many things you can抰 do in traditional scrapbooks that are available to you as a digital scrapbooker.

One of the things you can do is create your own scrapbook paper. Take any image and turn it into your own patterned paper. You can make your papers any colors you want to match the photos for your specific layouts!

You can also do some amazing things with your photos when you scrap digitally. I had a friend create her background paper out of a photo and layer another photo on top of it. It was amazing! You can add words and phrases onto your photos, color tint black and white photos, enlarge photos or turn your photos into cartoon drawings, depending on the software.

My personal preference for photo editing software is Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can make pages any size you want, use fun text effects and add lots of texture styles. Did you know you can take a rectangular block of color, add dots, layer on texture and it can look like polka dot grosgrain ribbon?? Photoshop Elements does have a definite learning curve and isn抰 intuitive like Microsoft Word, but once you play with it for a few times, it will get easier.

Now, playing with page effects on Photoshop Elements is fun for do-it-yourselfers, digital scrapbooking stores take all the hard work out of digital pages. Plus, the people who design the products are much more capable of making something that looks exactly the way it should. There is something to be said for the amount of time it saves by just buying a product. And you don抰 even have to wait for the item to ship. You just pay and download for almost instant access!

At many online stores, you can download any number of products and print them for your own pages. They have everything from fonts to cut outs and everything in between! You should see the amazing digital metal tags! They look so realistic!

One thing to consider is whether or not you plan to print your pages to put in a traditional scrapbook. If you want to print them out and like the 12\” x 12\” size, you will need to find a printer that will support that size paper. Most home printers won”t accommodate papers that big. You also have the added expense of the ink required to print out these pages, so you”ll have to weigh all these factors to see if it is a cost effective way for you to scrapbook. Now, there are some online photo developers that can actually print your pages as photos in this size, so that’’s another option!

Digital scrapbooking is a fun and new twist on scrapbooking. It takes some learning, but based on its growing popularity, it抯 here to stay!

Have you been thinking about a second job to supplement the family income? You may want to consider setting up a business on the internet if your present job is not enough to keep you and your family comfortable.

The great thing about setting up a business on the internet is that there are plenty of online businesses that are lucrative and can give you that much needed extra income. As a matter of fact there are many people who ventured into an online business on a part time basis and later on ended up quitting their day job to focus all their time on their home business when their business brought in a considerable amount of income.

There are some people who have made it big through their online business and you could be one of them. Put in enough time and effort and you too could profit big from the internet. It is not really that difficult to start a business on the internet. All you need is a computer, internet connection and some experience with software applications.

All you have to do to venture into an online business is search for a business that suits your present skills and resources the best. As long as you know the basics about computer applications, you can get started right away. You really don抰 need elaborate skills and knowledge on software and internet applications to get started. So, as you can see, it is quite simple.

Getting started with your business

You may want to work your online business on a part time basis in the beginning. Since you may not start earning a lot of money in the first few months of your online business you may want to keep your day job. Investing some time and a lot of effort into your online business is necessary before you can earn enough money to support your family.

Keep your day job and work your online business in the evening when everyone is in bed and the house is quiet. Investing a few hours a night to set up your website and working on the systems that you will use to run your business on the internet will get you well on your way to earning a full time income.

Getting your spouse or partner involved in your online business may be something you want to think about. It can be quite lonely and frustrating setting up and working on your business alone so the presence of your spouse or partner can really help to keep things together and entertaining. It is a fact that entrepreneurs who are setting up their online business alone are more likely to give up than those that have partners to work on their business with.

Also, this will give you and your spouse or partner some more time to spend together. After the kids go to sleep at night, you and your spouse or partner don抰 have to be in separate rooms doing different things. You can both work on your online business while supporting and encouraging each other.

An SEO content writer is the one who specializes written content that best suits the site in question so as it appears favorably in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN to name a few.

An average content writer will be very broad when writing the content and may not use the keywords necessary in a specific web site page, article, ezine or newsletter to gain maximum effect.

Keywords and keyword phrases play a n integral role for trying to obtain higher rankings in search engines for your site, which in turn generate increased website traffic to your online business.

SEO Writer Versus A Normal Writer

It is obvious from my writing experience that there are a lot of differences that set apart an average writer with an SEO content writer. An SEO writer understands the importance of keywords in content and will therefore structure articles with them in place accordingly. A lot of people fail to realize the importance of hiring a specialized SEO content writer and in the process tend to lose a lot of potential website traffic related to their specific industry.

Dealing With A Professional SEO Content Writer

A professional SEO content writer can help you choose highly competitive keywords and write the content with the specific keywords in mind. Search engines tend to filter the keywords while there spider bots are indexing your web site. This is important as you need a specific percentage of keywords in your entire 500 words content or web page to be successful. The SEO content maker will make sure to use required percentage of keyword throughout the web page to attain maximum benefit.

If you”re given web page has keyword density over and above a specific limit then search engines might consider your web content as SPAM, and ban or delist your site, something I am sure not many people would want to happen to the. This is where SEO content experts become an integral part of your SEO plan, use there knowledge about competitive keywords and keywords density to be used in every web page and get that website traffic your website requires.

Professional SEO experts are few and far between. Look up search engines for the best writers or look in article directories for the most active article submitters and maybe approach these article writers for advice.

Like anything really, once you find a good article or content writer (hopefully find a few) make sure you look after them. Finding another one will be a time consuming task and developing a new relationship will be much harder then maintaining a pre existing content writer relationship.

Here is what you should look for in hosting plan features:

Often hosting plan features are tied into the type of control panel that is provided with the hosting service. Most people take for granted that a control panel should be part of the package, but in smaller countries outside the USA this is often a ”luxury” that is not part of the hosting package!

Finding out whether your hosting server provider offer a control panel to manage your website is the first essential feature that you should look for. It is unacceptable to sign up for a hosting package if there is no control panel!

Common control panels for Linux hosting are (my recommendation is to go for Linux hosting and not Windows hosting):

Helm

Plesk

Cpanel

DirectAdmin

All these control panels have their supporters and detractors.

I have to honestly say that my preference is CPanel. Cpanel offers a lot of functionality and a user friendly interface.

The following features are available with CPanel hosting:

~ Email management ~

Under email management you can create and delete all your email accounts. You also have access to a Webmail facility so that you can read your email online (as opposed to linking to your email account with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express). You can also set up forwarders to forward one email account to another. You also have access to set up simple autoresponders to send an automated reply back if anyone sends an enquiry email to a specific email address.

~ Website statistics ~

Although most hosting providers do provide statistics facilities, it is worthwhile to make sure that they do. Some hosting providers think that the statistics programs consume too many resources on a shared environment and some of them therefore remove the facility. But statistics and the ability to analyze your traffic is essential when you set up a website, so make sure that you select a hosting provider that do provide you access to a web stats package. My personal favourite is AWStats. You can read an article on the different types of statistics programs as well as how to interpret your statistics here : http://www.tm4y.co.za/internet-marketing-tips/website-statistics.html

~ FTP ~

You should have FTP access to your website in order to upload files. This is absolutely essential if you want to manage your website. Cpanel also allows you to register new FTP accounts to give other people access to your website. You can restrict their access to specific folders on your website and specify if they should have read and/or write access.

~ File manager ~

If you are not comfortable with using an FTP package to upload your files, you can always use the file manager available in CPanel. The file manager enables you to upload files, unzip files on the server and to copy and delete files.

~ Backups ~

This allows you to make a backup of the files on your server, as well as to backup your MySQL database if you have one. This is very useful and should be done regularly. You cannot depend on the backups ran by the hosting service provider, since the service provider itself might just close its doors unexpectedly and you might not have access to your site – not to talk of your backups!

Fighting Grandads
In the red corner weighing in at 122g we have the MIGHTY… FIGHTING… GRANDAD!!! In the blue corner we have the challenger.. also weighing in at 122g we have the COLOSSAL…FIGHTING…GRANDAD!!!… In this O.A.P (Offensive Action Punch-up) Battle we will see which fighting granddad has been truly wound up more and which fighting granddad will be left standing to become the champ.

Letssss Getttt Readyyyy Toooo Mumbleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

*Ding Ding*

Round 1
Amazingly both Fighting Grandads have equipped themselves with a wheelie shopping trolley and of course the choice weapon of all OAP Fighters… The walking stick! *Ding*
*Ding Ding*

Round 2
Wow what a crazy first round lets hope it keeps up…. These fighting granddads are pulling out all the stops! They are now decked out in the classic Fighting Grandad fighting clothes.. Raincoat, Red Cardigan, Jauntily angled hat and a pair of elastic-waisted trousers hoisted up to the chest… Must let them move easier. *Ding*

*Ding Ding*

Round 3
Definitely the fight of the century! The Fighting Granddads are well wound up now, they are running towards each other in fits of rage swinging walking sticks and using the wheelie shopping trolleys to keep balanced I”ve never seen these tactics being used before! its amazing. And with the speedy swing of his cane the champion Fighting Grandad knocks out his opponent and wins again.*Ding*
Fighting Grandads Include:
Set of 2 wind-up Fighting Grandads.
Clashing outfits, Raincoat, Red Cardigan, Jauntily angled hat and a pair of elastic-waisted trousers.
Presented in an illustrated box with witty captions.
Dimensions of fighting grandads: approximately 9cm (H) x 10cm (D) x 9cm (W)

Fighting Grandads are looking for a new manager can you handle them?
Find-me-a-gift also sell

Racing nuns
http://www.find-me-a-gift.co.uk/racing-nuns.html

Racing Grannies
http://www.find-me-a-gift.co.uk/racing-grannies.html

Granny Race track
http://www.find-me-a-gift.co.uk/granny-race-track.html

Proper promotion and marketing is the key to the success of every business, be it online or any other. Without telling others about the quality and value of your products and services, you cannot hit the target audience. In an online business, the game is entirely of marketing on web portals. In this regard, search engine marketing is considered as one of the best and the most suited methods of promoting something on internet. Well, it is the search engine marketing tips that tells every professional and you also about the ways that can be adopted or taken care of while marketing on net.

Search engine marketing tips is a source of important information for experienced professionals, as well as beginners. This piece of information tells that certain things have to be taken care of for enhancing your business opportunities. First and the foremost thing as per search engine marketing tips is that your online business site should have a theme based design and graphics on your site. It is always beneficial to have a theme based design, rather than the general one. Whenever a visitor comes to your site, he or she will first get to have an eye on the design and if the design is not proper, then they will not visit your site again.

Now it is the turn of creative content that is used to give a description of your products and services. As per the search engine marketing tips, you should see to it that the content matches the thoughts that you want to express. It is generally said that words have the power of describing just about anything. And the content should be convincing enough to turn your visitors into customers and get you desired profits. After all, we are all here to earn profits and not to suffer losses. Another thing to be noticed as per search engine marketing tips is that you can accompany pictures that best describe your words.

Search engine marketing tips helps in improving the visibility of your online business on the search engines. These tips facilitate the working of numerous search engine marketing firms that provide marketing services. Many of them charge reasonable amount to help you in creating a peak position for your site in the search engines. If you are new to the field of online business, then search engine marketing tips will surely give you the right pathway to success. You will be spending so much to get your site on the top and have maximum number of traffic.

Nothing on your site will work, if it is not access friendly. And to be access friendly, you have to make sure that all the links on the web pages of your site should be working properly. Just think the amount of loss you will suffer, if the visitor coming to your site is not able to access it. It is obvious that you would not like this to happen. This thing is also mentioned in search engine marketing tips. In fact, all the professionals in search engine marketing firm consider it as one of the most important help.