What defines a blog? A blog has two very important characteristics:

1. It offers the possibility to quickly and easily create and publish your content
2. Has a mechanism that allow readers to leave comments or another form of feedback

If you miss any of the above you do not have a blog. For sure you can argue that Seth Godin for example, does not accept comments. You are right but he accepts trackbacks which is a form of feedback.

Coming back to conversations or content discussion we can see that a blog has both. It has content created and published usually by the owner and it has the feedback mechanisms that spark the conversations. And that’s why blogging got so much traction. In 2008 13% of the US population was maintaining a blog. This will increase to 17% form the US population by 2013. The readers of blogs represented in 2008 45% of the US population and they will increase to 58% by 2013. This means that by 2013 128 million people in the US will read blogs while 38 million will blog.

When you start blogging the first thing you have to decide is what to blog about. If you are blogging for business you should ask yourself who are your customers and then figure out what are they interested about. Statistics show that you will find your blogging “voice” and you’ll figure out how to blog after creating the first 30 posts.

By now you should have a lot of questions: How to blog? Is blogging for me? What platform to use? What should I write about? What layout should my blog have? What theme should I choose? What domain name? Most of these questions will be answered in the first class of Inbound Marketing University that you can watch below. Learn how to blog, enjoy and if you have more questions or comments, post them below.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

Photo credits by Courtney Bolton

Today I found a great offer. The problem is that it expires on June 4th so if you want to take advantage of it you should act fast. You can get the Thesis Theme bundled with a plugin (ScribeSEO) for which you will get a discounted price ($27/month instead of $97/month) for as long as you choose to use the product. And everything comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

How it all works? It’s as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Purchase your Thesis theme from here

2. Email me your order reference number that you received form DIYThemes and I will send you a special code for getting the ScribeSEO Advanced plugin for $27/month (instead of $97/month).

3. Sign-up for ScribeSEO Advanced here before June 4th 2010 using the code I sent you.

Here is what you will get in this bundle:

The renowned Thesis Theme used by Chris Brogan (chrisbrogan.com), Brian Clark (Copyblogger.com) and many other. Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like the ones here, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme!  You’ll love it.
Check out the Thesis demo site
See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase

ScribeSEO plugin helps writers create content that gets found online, and that’s become as valued and important as any old scroll or parchment.
Scribe is an SEO software service (web-based and a WordPress version) that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, you name it… at the click of a button.
The Scribe API then reports back and tells web writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and small business owners how to tweak their content to get more search engine traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy.
It’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.
What’s innovative about Scribe is in the way it differs from typical SEO tools. Instead of asking you for a keyword phrase and then pushing you to construct content around it, Scribe:

• Analyzes what you’ve already written, preserving your natural flow
• Reveals what search engines will think you’re writing about
• Suggests changes to better reflect the language searchers are using
• Guides you through remaining content elements based on SEO best practices

With Scribe you’ll:

• Optimize content faster
• Eliminate guesswork about keywords
• Employ SEO best practices
• Preserve maximum readability
• Increase targeted traffic!

Find out more about ScribeSEO or take Scribe on a free Test Drive now.

Image by Ella’s Dad

I am a Thesis and Scribe affiliate but this is the only way I can make this great offer.

Whatever we do, we need marketing. Whether is for selling our products, for getting a better job or just for strengthening our personal brand we need to employ certain marketing techniques. But how and where can we learn these techniques?

There a tons of sites that offer free or paid advice. But it takes time to find those sites, then to try what they are teaching and find out what is working for you or not for your business.

There is another way to do this. We can find out who are the gurus, ninjas or experts in marketing and try to reach them, participate in their seminars and learn from them. The main issue is that we cannot stop learning while new things are discovered every day. So we need to establish a relationship with these experts and participate at their seminars regularly.

But I found a better way. The Third Tribe Marketing. It was founded by Chris Brogan (New Marketing Labs), Brian Clark (CopyBlogger), Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net) and Sonia Simone (Remarkable Communications). to provide the most effective Internet marketing information available, not just from the founders, but from people that master this art.

Since I joined the Third Tribe I more than 10 hours of audio content:

Product Launch Strategies: What Always Works and What’s Working in 2010

Jeff Walker & Sonia Simone

How to Get Your Customers to Do Your Best Marketing for You

John Jantsch & Chris Brogan

Email Marketing Strategies that Work

Sonia Simone & Brian Clark

Action Email: Copywriting Tips for Insanely Effective Email Marketing

Dave Navarro & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part One – the Problogger model

Darren Rowse & Brian Clark

Internet Business Models: Part Two – the Chris Brogan model

Chris Brogan & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part Three – the Copyblogger model

Brian Clark & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part Four – the Zen Habits model

Leo Babauta & Darren Rowse

The Quick Start Guide to Making Money Online

Johnny Truant & Sonia Simone

Advanced Affiliate Marketing with Social Media and SEO

Brian Clark & Glenn Allsopp

This plus a lot of new marketing content is what you’ll get if you join Third Tribe Marketing today. You will get also a lot of useful advice on the forums and you’ll find a lot of new friends ready to help you. And if you join before June 1st, 2010 your membership fee remains locked at the current price ($47/month) for as long as you will enjoy the community. If instead you choose to join after June 1st the price will go up ($97/month) so better join today.

When we write a blog post or any piece of internet content we have to take into account a lot of things like the number of words a post should have, the frequency of the keywords present in the article, their prominence or density, what tags you should post for your article and so on. Unfortunately Scribe will not write the post for you. Instead it will give you the statistics for your article, it will give you a grade based on how optimized is your piece of content, it will recommend the tags for your post and it will give you a lot of advice on optimizing your article and changing keywords. I have used this service for the past month and it is just brilliant. It has optimized my posts from the beginning (before posting them) and it has also educated me on what I should consider when writing a headline, description or the body of the article. So in time I managed to get high SEO grades on my articles from the first analysis.

The SEO service is developed to be either a WordPress plugin which is great for those that use WordPress to power their blogs. You just have to press a button and your post gets analyzed and optimized. It has also a web based version. With this last one you can optimize any piece of content, grade it and when you are content with what you got you just have to copy and paste it in your CMS (Content Management System).

The only downside of this service is that you have to pay for it. The price starts from $27 a month for 30 evaluations which is more than enough if you have just a blog. You can choose the publisher option that gives you 120 evaluations for $47 or the advanced option where you have to pay $97 for 300 SEO evaluations.

1. The easiest way is to go to your profile page (Users->Admin) and choose your name as your nickname instead of the default admin.

2. The other way is to create a new user for you (go to Users-> Add New) with your name. In this way WordPress will display your name (your new user name) as the one that published the post. The only thing that you have to take care is to log in with the new user name and password.

Have other issues with WordPress? Drop a comment here!

In my opinion this is a false problem. There is a lot of information over the internet regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and still a lot of companies have enough market to grow. Also the information regarding the diagnosis of specific diseases and their treatment is available on the web, but still you hardly find patients that are putting their diagnostic and treat themselves based on that information.

Here are my 5 reasons to share all your knowledge:

1. The more you share the more you will be seen as an expert and when I have a problem I will ask an expert to solve it for me

2. By sharing more information you will build a tribe of followers that may refer you as an expert in that particular field resulting in increased sales

3. If more people are following you and training in your subject area of expertise you can extend your business to training those people meaning again more sales

4. Not everyone has the resources and want to invest in learning from the information you share. Sufficient people will not have the time or the will to learn and they are your target clients

5. By opening discussions you open yourself to new points of view that may enable you to innovate the domain in which you have expertise. In this way you will maintain your competitive edge.

Dan Ronken elaborated more on these reasons and got to the following reasons:

1. Unselfishness attracts future customers

2. Building community

3. Helping others succeed. The old adage, “Give a man a fish feed him for a day, teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

4. Hence a foundation of capitalism, right? Specialization.

5. Open mindedness

What do you think? Are these reasons enough for you or you want to add some more?

I said that no comments is like Communism. As you may have already found out I come from a fomer communist country. In those days you were encouraged to have just the “official” opinion and all the others were banned. I lived those days and we were afraid to talk and tell what we were thinking. We could end in jail for our opinions (some people did it). It took me a long time to go over this fear but now I am cured.

In those days you had no option. Or you go with the crowd or you go to jail. Now, your readers have a multitude of options. They can read millions of blogs and they can comment on them. Why should you put yourself in a less appealing position than your competition? Why should you let your readers go to the others without getting the feedback about your posts?

On the other hand when you start opening the comments to your readers you will be in the same position but with much more content. You will still have no comments but you will have more posts than before.

Social media and blogging is about interaction. You want to start discussions not to just state your opinion. You want people to comment and if they have the choice but they do not comment then may be you do something wrong. You should open yourself to comments, invite your readers to state their opinion and create more intriguing content and then you will have comments.

What do you think? Are you still afraid of no comments?

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