Blogging Tips from Cyberdude

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eBay isn’t just an auction and a marketplace: often it can feel quite a lot like a game. Like any game, you can get ahead if you think strategically, using your head to outwit the other buyers and get the best price. Here are a few things you can try.

Shop in the Summer.

This is simple, but effective. Summer is the quiet season on eBay - almost everything sells for less. While everyone else is out enjoying the sun, invest a little time to find some real bargains.

Beat Them by a Few Cents.

Outbid people by a few cents instead of a few dollars - if they don’t check back before the auction ends, then you will be the winner. To avoid people using this tactic on you, though, always bid strange, hard-to-guess amounts instead of round numbers.

Play Dirty.

If you know when the auction ends, you can get in there at the very last second and outbid your rivals. The chances are that they won’t have the time to sit in front of the auction waiting for it to end - as a rule, he who stays wins. If someone else does retaliate at the end of the auction, though, try not to get carried away in those last few seconds and end up paying too much!

Take Risks.

This is a strategy for the braver eBay buyer. All of the advice you will see for eBay beginners tells you to buy items that have good pictures, clear descriptions, trustworthy sellers and all the rest. If you’re brave, why not take a risk and do the exact opposite?

Many buyers won’t want that item from the seller with a feedback rating of 5, no picture and a one-line description. If you take a calculated risk and bid anyway, you might be able to make a tiny bid and win by default. There are people on eBay who make their living from winning auctions like these, taking good pictures of the item, writing a good description and then reselling it at a huge profit. Be careful, though: do this for long enough, and you will inevitably lose your money at some point. It’s especially unwise to try it with very high-value items.

Avoid Bidding Wars.

There are few things on eBay that are so rare that you’ll only see them once and never again. There are usually quite a few sellers who have an item. What’s more, they will generally have more than one to sell, even if they haven’t listed them all at once. Always check your seller’s history to see whether they sell your item all the time - and if they do, then wait for the next one instead of bidding to the skies.

Now, there may come a time in your eBay life when you realise that you’ve screwed up your bid, and you wish there was an ‘undo’ button. Here’s the good news for you: there is! The next email will be all about withdrawing your eBay bids.

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eBay are a little strict about letting you withdraw your bid. They call it a ‘bid retraction’, and have a stringent set of conditions that you must meet before you are allowed to do it. Here are eBay’s three acceptable reasons for withdrawing a bid.

You made a typographical error: This means that you accidentally typed the wrong amount into the bid box, bidding a far higher price than you meant to. This can be scary: imagine bidding $100 and accidentally adding an extra ‘0′! You are entirely allowed to withdraw your bid in this situation, and bid again if you want to.

The item’s description changed: If you bid on something and then the seller updates the description, you have the right to withdraw your bid. It wouldn’t be fair, after all, to force you to take something that you now realise you don’t want.

The seller is uncontactable: If emails to the seller bounce and they don’t answer their phone, then the auction obviously can’t continue, and you can cancel it.

So How Do I Retract My Bid?

eBay hide away the bid retraction form a bit, because they don’t like people using it. You can find it by going here: http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?RetractBidShow.

Now all you need is the item number from your auction: this can be found on the item description page’s top right corner. If you can’t see it on the page, look in your browser’s title bar, and in any emails eBay have sent you about your bid on the item. Choose one of the three allowed reasons, click ‘retract bid’, and you’re done.

Are There Any Consequences?

Well yes, there are. The more unethical among you might have considered that you could just cancel bids anytime you feel like it by saying that you accidentally entered the wrong amount. eBay are one step ahead of you. Each time you retract a bid, it is counted on your feedback page for all to see - and anyone with a lot of retracted bids looks more than a little dodgy. eBay also say that abusing the bid retraction feature could get you banned.

So is there a way to retract your bid without facing a penalty? There is if your seller is nice, and most are. Sellers can cancel bids on their auctions at any time, and if you email them with a half-decent excuse then most will be more than happy to do this for you. After all, it’s not in their interest for their item to go to someone who won’t like it, as you might leave negative feedback.

Of course, retracting your bid should still be a rare thing: you won’t win auctions that way! If you’ve followed us this far, the chances are you’ve won an auction by now, or you’re close - but you might be a little puzzled about what to do next. Our next email will give you a few pointers.

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Often a young, weak and naïve entrepreneur who owns a Blog will attempt to upgrade their image by posting “Fake” replies to their original posts. If the ISP information is hidden the other viewers can never know for sure if in fact the reply posts are real. The original poster believes that they cannot be caught. Unfortunately for them it becomes quite obvious over time.

How can you tell when an entrepreneur is making fake Blog posts? Well it is simple really, there are no links to the reply posters website. Also often the Blogger attempting to keep things going will post several like this in a row, attempting to make specific points that either were not addressed or to steer a dialogue or point of contention in the original Blog Post.

Is this really a crime? Well actually yes it really is a crime, it is called; “Buzz Marketing” and it is against the law if you are selling something or making money directly or indirectly off the activities that you are doing. If your Blog is posted at a different domain name, but still has links to your main domain name or appears to be associated it is still breaking the law.

Luckily for weak and naïve entrepreneurs who do this, the FTC or Federal Trade Commission does not have time to hunt down all the culprits who do this, so most likely if you are doing this, you are safe for now, but realize that will not always be the case and you are still technically breaking the law.

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The World Wide Web is laden with opportunities for the budding entrepreneur. However, maximizing your online presence may require building up offline advertising as well as online. Set the momentum for your online marketing strategy with offline marketing. Plaster your offset posters all over and watch a spike in your website’s traffic in a matter of day.

1. Breaking the Search Engine Optimization Catch-22

Although they claim that online business is a fair playing field, you may find yourself on a catch-22. The more traffic your website gets the better chances it has of ranking better at major search engines, and the higher the rank of your website the more chances it has of generating traffic.

Unless you optimize your website and market it aggressively, you may risk having your offer lost to the oblivion of the net. With a little investment, offline advertising can give your traffic a little push and break into the catch-22 and getting the momentum started. A little help from offline advertising can go a long way in optimizing your website.

2. Direct Your Customers Search

Many online businesses are innovations of traditional industries. Book publishing has an online print-on-demand counterpart. TV commercials are now being launched exclusively on YouTube. People are shifting to blogs for review magazines, etc.

In most cases, people stumble upon these websites serendipitously as they type in different keywords. When you want to increase the searches for a particular keyword, you can use posters to direct the attention of your customers to the existence of your blog.

Think of the World Wide Web as a very big jungle of information one can easily get lost in. Your posters are the land mark, maps, or pointers that can get more people to the gold mine.

3. Tapping into the Mostly-Offline Market

Many online advertising only caters to those who spend a lot of time online. For the majority of internet users though who spend a limited time on the internet and often with a task at hand is likely oblivious to the services you have to offer.

Your posters are your way to communicate with a mostly-offline market and get them to take a second look at your offers. You can simply demonstrate to them the ease online transactions offer with online payments and delivery schemes.

Treat your poster as an awareness campaign that aims to educate people about the functions of the web. Show them ways buying their commodity items online can save them time and effort.

You can have them printed in budget friendly volumes and sizes. It can be printed in a hundred pieces or in a few thousand pieces depending on your needs. The more prints you get the cheaper each piece becomes. You can also choose to print in smaller and cheaper size of 11×17 or the bigger 27×39 inches for more impact. There are also in between sizes of 18×24 and 24×26 inches.

Offset posters are an inexpensive investment to get your e-commerce business going. It taps into a mostly-offline market, gives your traffic a head start, and directs customer search.

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Are you a blogger of the type who likes to write as little as possible? Problem ahead! Come up with a number of quality posts on a daily or weekly basis. More posts attract more traffic, more inbound links and search engines have more reasons to list your blog.

To have more number of blog posts in your blog, you will have to dedicate more time – researching latest developments in the area of your interest, presenting your thoughts and at times –breaking news.

The Advantages of having more Posts in Your Blog
Your Readers See You as Someone Who Spends Time on Your Blog

You spend more time on the things you like (or the things you have to do). With hundreds of blog posts around a specific topic, all written by you, the readers to your blog see you as a guy or a gal, passionate about what you say. The readers see a new post by you, whenever they open their RSS feed reader. They will think, oh what a passionate person, he/she always have to say something about blogging, landscape photography, climbing rocks, down-hilling, rearing cattle, cooking pizza . . .

A new reader to the blog is also likely to subscribe to your feed, after seeing two or three pages of your blog.

More Inbound Links
Other bloggers who have shared interests with you will be following up with your blog via your RSS feeds. Your blog posts, that are worthy of note will get the attention of fellow bloggers and they are more likely to drop a link to your post.

More Search Engine Listings
I can’t push this point enough. The more you write, the more your chances are to get listed in Google and MSN Live search. Yahoo is a bit hard. I have seen Google sending traffic to my blogs, for the phrases I have never thought of as a keyword.

The point here is, forget for a moment about keywords and Search Engine Optimization. Instead, focus on what you like to do. That is, write more about your favorite topic. Regular updating of your blog allows search engines to find more keywords in your blog and a chance for them, to present one of your blog posts as search results.

I also tell you write blog posts of reasonable quality – both content and grammar should be OK. Better than OK gives you plus points.

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The title “Increase Blog Traffic Through SEO Forum Posts” may sound ominous and confusing but it really is quite simple.

Most bloggers find that getting blog traffic is the most difficult part of blogging.

I have the solution to your blog traffic woes.

With just a few simple steps you will find your blog traffic increased plus your blog’s page rank will increase as well.

The first step to building blog traffic is to visit a keyword suggestion site (such as www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion) and find a key word that is relevant to your blog and searched for quite often.

Next off in creating blog traffic, find a forum with a high page rank that has content relevant to your blog. You may need to install a Google toolbar to see certain webpages page rank.

Once you have found a forum with a high PR (page rank), create a new post with your keyword in the title of the post and within the first paragraph of your post, then write your post as normal. Within the forum post or within your signature include a link to your blog.

This will increase your blog traffic because you have created a keyword optimized forum post on a forum that has a high PR. There will be a good chance of this post ending up on the first page of Google. Now when someone searches the keyword you chose and finds your forum post they will have an opportunity to follow the link to your blog.

Follow these steps a few times a day you should see a big increase in your blog traffic.

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Your blog is up and running. You’re regularly posting information you think your audience will enjoy and benefit from. Now, you need to build some traffic. Here are some ways to increase blog traffic.

1. Create a feed on Yahoo.com. You’ll need a free Yahoo account. Navigate to the MyYahoo page and add your blog’s feed. This will get your blog indexed faster to increase blog traffic through natural searches on Yahoo and other search engines.

2. Go to pingomatic.com and “ping” your blog every time you add a new blog post. This process notifies the major blog directories that your blog has been updated, thereby helping you increase blog traffic.

3. Submit your blog to blog directories. Some popular blog directories are: http://www.blogcatalog.com, http://www.bloggernity.com, and http://www.blogarama.com.

4. Submit articles to free article directories and link your blog’s URL in the resource box. This will get you better page rankings and help increase blog traffic through natural searches.

5. Visit blogs related to your own and leave comments. Write something useful, rather than the all too often seen “Great blog. Now visit mine at…” types of comments, which are often deleted as spam.

6. Link to related blogs on your own blog and ask others to link to you. The more people who link to your blog, the better page rank you’ll get from search engines. A good page rank will increase blog traffic.

7. Blog as often as possible. People like fresh content that is updated regularly.

8. Use signature lines to your advantage. If you post in forums, link to your blog in your sig line. Include your blog’s link in your outgoing emails.

9. If you can afford it, sign up with Google’s Adwords. If you’re on a tight budget, you can choose the lowest option, which is 25 cents per day. You can choose to promote through keyword searches and/or through having your link placed on related sites. Both ways can increase blog traffic.

10. Consider purchasing a domain name for your blog. You can get a domain name for less than $10 per year. Unlike having a website, when you have a blog, you won’t have to pay for hosting. Choose your domain name wisely. Of course, your domain name will need to relate to your blog. Choosing a keyword phrase that a lot of people who’d want to find your blog might search for is the best idea.

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You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

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Read Blogging Tips From Blogging Mix for more practical, simple and effective blogging tips! 

If you are just getting started out online, one of the easiest things to do to test the proverbial income opportunity waters, is to simply start a blog. For the most part, you can have a blog up and running in about 30 minutes and depending on what kind of hosting solution you want (self hosted on your own server, or hosted by the platform provider) you can get started for FREE in most cases.

The opportunities that abound as a result of all of this great, open source and readily available technology would make the marketers of 1990 jealous, saying NOTHING about the great minds of decades ago. Here are the five simple steps I have outlined for YOU to get started today - and should cost you less than 15 bucks to start you own upstart publishing empire..:-)

1) Register a domain name (9 bucks)

2) Get a cheap economy hosting plan ( 3 bucks)

3) Install Wordpress - a fantastic ( and free) open source blogging platform that is incredibly powerful, scalable and used by many professional grade bloggers and news aggregators around the web - including moi..;-) ( Free)

4) One Venti Starbucks coffee with an express shot ( 3 bucks)

5) Start blogging! ( priceless)

Now, obviously there is a LITTLE bit more to making money with your new blog…but quite frankly, not much! You want to pick a niche, populate your categories and do some other simple SEO optimization exercises to ensure your blog gets noticed, install some simple monetization modules (contextual ads, affiliate offers, etc) and keep the content fresh, hot and regular - just like your extra large coffee.;-) That’s it - and don’t forget to ask any questions if you have them. Happy blogging! See you at the bank..:-)

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Blogs often fail because their owners run out of topics to write about, and in a fit of frustration and writer’s block, they give up. People have trouble coming up with ideas oftentimes, and that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything bad about your ability as a blogger. It just means that you need to come up with a new method of developing ideas.

Here’s a good writer’s best kept secret: when you run out of ideas of your own, look to other people for inspiration. The following are great tips for developing blog topics when your own creativity well comes up dry:

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #1: Go to the Search Engines

I myself have found Google to be very accommodating in providing me with blog topics. Run a search that focuses on your blog’s niche. For example, let’s say that your blog’s niche is tattoos. You may consider typing the following phrases into the search engine:

• How do I get a tattoo?
• I’m having problems with my tattoo
• I need help with my tattoo

Look through the results and see what you find. People read blogs in order to find out information. “How to”-type topics are great, and this is a great way to find them.

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #2: Join a Forum

The majority of Web Sites today have forums. Join forums that focus on your blog’s niche and see what people are talking about, and then make them the focus of your blog. I’ve found that this method usually provides weeks’ worth of blog topics.

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #3: Check Out Other Blogs

This doesn’t mean that you should copy their topics. Remember, one of the main ingredients in developing a strong blog readership is to provide topics and content that are unique. However, reading other peoples’ blogs usually provides inspiration and often promotes the chance to write about a topic from a fresh perspective that people will enjoy. Again, don’t copy other peoples’ blogs!

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #4: Watch the News

Local and national news shows are always abreast of the latest topics and trends in the world. They also provide a plethora of blogging ideas to choose from. You may not always find information that suits your blog’s niches; however, you should still stay tuned in to the news to make sure you don’t miss out on the chance to write about a topic before others do.

Tip for Developing Good Blog Topics #5: Ask Your Readers

A good blogger always provides a way for his readers to contact him. It’s a great way to build relationships with readers and to keep them coming back. If you feel like you’re running out of blog topics, then ask your readers what they would like to read about.

When you go in search of fresh topic ideas it is important that you do not plagiarize. For starters, it’s unethical, and secondly, it means that your blog is not cutting edge and will not stand out from the many other mediocre blogs on the Internet.

It’s common for people to run out of topic ideas for their blog.

When this happens to you, don’t panic and don’t give up on your blog. Instead, get creative and let the ideas of other people inspire you.

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