This is a guest post by Jeff Gross. Jeff is a consultant and content contributor for new Queens homes community.

Social networking has become a treasure trove of new clientele for the companies that know how to do it the right way – doing it right involves creating natural conversations and targeting an audience that is interested in your product. However I’m sure the “how” of social networking will be covered at another time. For now, which is better, the new Google social network adventure or the tried and tested Facebook?

Google+

You may not have heard of it yet, but chances are you will. Yes the end-all be-all of internet, Google, has created a social network platform with the somewhat lofty goal of rivaling Facebook. For those who track what’s going on in the online world, this is not Google’s first attempt at this. The last was remarkable only in its utter lack of success in comparison to everything else Google tries. Will this time be better?

As with most consumer based products—and it is a product despite their insistence that it be called a “project”—it is nearly impossible to tell at this point, but it has potential. Here are some positives to creating a Google+ page for your company:

1. It is backed by the most powerful company on the internet, and they seem committed to making it work this time.
2. They claim much of their software is better than Facebook. Is it possible for a multibillion dollar internet corporation to create code better than a few college kids living in a dorm? We’ll see.
3. They do have a lot (we’ve been notified) of new free stuff not available on Facebook. That might be worth checking out at least.

Facebook

The real victim no matter what happens is MySpace. Whatever happened to that site? Facebook has become the most popular social network, exponentially out performing other social networks. It is second in overall visits to any site, only Google gets more visits… and a bunch of people visiting Google are probably looking for one Facebook page or another. Here are the somewhat obvious benefits:

1. Tons of users
2. People are used to it, they’re not used to Google+
3. Proven natural traffic
4. Simple to setup and to use
5. Well-known and used worldwide

Conclusion

You need a Facebook page, and you need to learn how to market your product or service the right way using social networks. There is a right and wrong way, and a series of ads and hard sells aren’t going to get the traffic you need. There are tons of helpful articles that can show you how to promote your Facebook page the right way. In addition, though not mentioned here, Twitter is a great “gateway” to both your Facebook and website, and there are a number of programs that allow you to make simultaneous updates to both your Facebook and Google pages so this may be something to look into.

As for Google+, right now it is too early to say. It is not harmful, so if you have the time making a page is a good idea. How much time you spend on updates etc. is up to you, but right now Facebook should still be the priority.

This is a guest post by Michael Stevens.

Blogging is a popular profession and hobby which is becoming increasingly more so as new media gains importance. As smart phones become increasingly pervasive, they are developing into rich blogging gadgets in their own right. If you are a writer or photographer, consider adding a new dimension to your posts by blogging on the go from your phone.

Of course, blogging apps include all the features you might expect to find. Writing, tagging and categorizing posts may be a bit awkward from a tiny touch screen, but a Bluetooth keyboard can make typing on your phone almost as comfortable as using a laptop or desktop computer. However, many popular blogging apps include features simply not found on desktop or web-based interfaces to your blogging platform of choice.

In particular, photo and video sharing is incredibly simple when blogging from your smart phone. No longer waste time transferring media to your computer, creating a new post and then uploading the result. Instead, capture video or photos as you write, or share them from your phone’s gallery. If your blog is primarily concerned with visual media, this time savings may make the smart phone your blogging client of choice.

Image via Wikipedia

Some smart phone blogging apps aren’t just limited to posting. The WordPress app for Android and IOS devices not only lets you post, but also enables full management of many blogs directly from the client. Busy blogging professionals and casual hobbyists alike will appreciate the convenience of editing posts, moderating comments and changing settings for multiple blogs, all without needing to access the full web interface on their smart phone browser.

If smart phone blogging becomes a popular or necessary part of your routine, you may wish to consider a SIM only plan for your phone. Many cell phones are part of a package deal, including everything you need to get online. While this is convenient in many instances, some bloggers don’t need another handset. A SIM Only deal is great for freedom as they offer anything from a month to month plan to 12 or 24 month contracts.

This means, as long as your phone is unlocked, you can change network providers if the signal is not good in your area, or if you find a better deal with another provider.

Whether you blog to make money or simply enjoy sharing your experiences with the world, mobile blogging apps are a great way to blog on the move. Combined with a SIM only plan you have a great and safe platform for blogging your experiences with distant family and friends. Head over to your favourite market or app store and consider adding a blog client to your home screen today.

Get direct targeted highly searched, non competitive keyphrases for every post. Keyword Winner is going to shape the way we do SEO today. This unique plugin will revolutionize SEO, particularly for bloggers.

Daniel Lew just invented an amazing SEO plugin called Keyword Winner. This new revolutionary plugin is already changing the face of SEO for good according to Daniel and from what some top of the leading internet marketers in the industry have said.

Daniel who has had more than 5 years experience running SEO companies around the globe felt that there was a missing link between blogging and SEO particularly for internet marketers and businesses who seem to constantly fail to get ahead of their competitors in the search engines.

Keyword Winner makes writing posts and ranking high in the search engines so much easier, no need to write different headlines in Google to find the best one based on its competing pages and search trends, it’s all there at your fingertips in your blog post admin.

Getting top rankings is no easy game, not only do you have to think of amazing headlines to strike your audience, you have to get this headline ranked well so that it appears in good position in Google.

With good position you will get more hits, leading to more sales and make more money!

Here is an overview of what Keyword Winner has to offer:

1. Competition, Insights, Search Trends and Backlink Analysis
Once you type a headline in your blog post, you can click “get suggestions” making it easy to get instant stats so that you can choose the best headline based on its overall searches per month, competitive nature and search trend! (1. Google Insights 2. Google Competition 3.Google Trends 4. Bing Backlinks) You can even add tags as well!

2. Keyword Suggestions for Low Competition Headlines
Keyword suggestions are there at your finger tips making it easier to target the right headlines and rank to the 1st page easily.

3. Colors Highlighted to Target Specific Search Terms
Less competitive phrases are highlighted green, orange for average competing keywords and more competitive phrases are highlighted red! You can drill down on any suggested keyword until you get a low competition keyword.

4. Page Competition Rank Checker
Bloggers can quickly view the competition rank in admin area of their old blog posts and easily edit and improve page competition.

5. Awesome Bloggers SEO Tool
Bloggers can now write reviews by targeting specific keywords on affiliate products to get to the top of Google and convert pages into sales.

Price is as follows:

$47 – 1 site license

$97 – Unlimited site license

On top of all this if for any reason you are unhappy Keyword Winner will offer a 60 day money back guarantee, you really cannot lose only win!

Blogging is not an easy hobby, it takes time, hard-work and commitment.

With so much-needed these days to create a popular blog it is easy to see why so many give up after only a few months. It is no longer enough to just publish create content, you also have to promote it and network with others to help get your posts read.

Add to that the fact that most people have to fit their blog around their full-time jobs and family commitments and you are left with a very time-consuming hobby.

With that in mind I want to share with you 4 tips that will help you to become a more productive blogger and get the most out of your time.

1. Allocate Time To Blog – One of the best things that I have done to improve my blogging productivity is to allocate time during my week to my blogging activities. I tend to allocate an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays to create new content for my blogs. By setting the time aside I can make sure that blogging is my only task for that hour allowing me to focus on the task in hand and get more done. I find I get more content written when I am focused solely on doing just that and don’t have any other activities to do.
2. Go Offline – This is a tip that many bloggers tend to find pretty silly. What I mean is when you are working on content for your blog, disconnect yourself from the Internet.. Why? Think about how many distractions that you have online, the most notable being Social Media. By removing the distraction of constant Twitter, Facebook  and email updates I have been able to produce an extra blog post per hour.
3. Get A Notebook – One of the most time-consuming aspects of blogging is thinking about what to write. If you are in a news niche then you will always have fresh content, however if you blog in a more specific niche then it is usually up to you to think up exciting content that your visitors want to read. My tip to you is to always carry a small notepad wherever you go. I find that inspiration for blog posts can pop up at any time of the day and having a notepad on me means that I can jot down the potential title and the thoughts that are running through my head at that time. This means that when I sit down to start writing content I already have a couple of ideas to form the basis of my first couple of posts.
4. Separate Publishing and Promotion – As I said before there is a lot more to blogging these days than just publishing great content. You have to get out there and promote it to people in your niche, whether that be through Twitter, Facebook, Email marketing or comments on other blogs. I found that I became more productive when I separated the publishing and promotion angles to blogging. As I mentioned above I set aside an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays for producing my content, I then schedule an hour at some point during the week to get out there are promote my posts. I then find that through-out the week I will get odd hours that I have free, I can then use this time to do a bit of promotion. It is much easier to jump in and promote your blog in your free time that it is to sit down and produce content.

You may have seen the hype over the past 24 hours about the launch of Google’s venture into the social networking arena with their Google+ Project.

I gained access to it earlier today and have played around on it for a few hours now and I thought I would share my early views on it.

What Is Google Plus?

It seems to me that Google have gone for an approach that is a mix between Facebook and Twitter. It is a social network that allows you to connect with friends and share content.

What I Like:

There are a few features that I am really loving at the moment.

1. Circles - Circles is the name that Google appears to gives its friends feature. Rather than having a bulk of ‘Friends’ you have a collection of Circles. These can be split into areas such as Family, Friends and Work Colleagues and are a way of grouping your contacts. The joy in this feature is that when you post updates on Google+ you can direct them at only the relevant people. This means that you have better control about who sees your updates.
2. Hangout - This could very much be a Skype killer! This feature allows you to ‘hangout’ with people via webcam. It is a difficult feature to put into words but it is essentially a webcam chat room where you can connect with people chat and share content/videos. I think this will be a useful tool for bloggers who want to interact with their followers. They can simply set themselves to ‘hanging out’ and their followers can link up for a chat.
3. Huddle - This is like a group msn chat that makes it easier to have a conversation as a group as everyone can see the updates and will know exactly what is going on.

These are just a couple of the features that I have had a play with so far.

One obvious feature that is currently missing for me is a ‘Facebook Page’ alternative. If Google can add that then I think it will have a good shout of pulling me away from Facebook and performing most of my activities via Google+.

Conclusion

I think it is a very bright start by Google and it has the makings of a brilliant service. Is is better than Facebook? At the moment I would have to say potentially! I think it all depends on whether Google+ can attract the less tech savvy people. At the moment is very much being taken up by bloggers, internet marketers and businesses, if it can reach out to the average Joes who are more interested in sharing photos and videos then it has a fantastic chance of taking off.

Blog contests, you have probably seen loads of them advertised around the blogosphere today already. But why are so many bloggers running them on their blogs?

The fact is that blog contests have many benefits for bloggers, with the only downside being that you need to arrange a prize, this can sometimes be a difficult task if you are not able to give something away from yourself or afford to offer a prize from your own pocket.

I want to share with you 5 reasons why you should run a contest on your blog:

1. Community - Blog contests are a great way of building a community around your blog. It is a great way of interacting with your readers and giving them a chance to get involved with your blog. Contests keep people coming back and checking the progress of the contests and interacting with your other readers.
2. Comments - Blog contest posts tend to get more comments on average compared to other types of posts. This is usually because people have to comment to enter but people also like to interact more with these posts.
3. Subscribers - When people enter a contest they always want to be sure they will find out if they win, this means that many will also sign up to the blogs RSS feed to stay up-to-date with the progress of the contest. Many bloggers also like to make it compulsory to sign up to the RSS feed as part of the contest entry. This shows that contests are a great way of boosting your RSS signups.
4. Backlinks - People love contests, they also love linking to contests. This is because people respond well to contests so if you point someone in the direction of a good contest then people will remember that you provided them with this valuable information. This means that contest posts tend to receive more backlinks than other post types. Also, some bloggers make it compulsory to write about the contest on their blogs including a link back to the contest post.
5. Content - A great style of contest that is popular at the moment is a guest posting contest. The great thing about these contests is that they are a great way of getting more valuable content on your blog from other bloggers. The incentive for the blogger is that they have a chance of winning the prize as well as getting a link back to their own blog. This content can attract new readers and subscribers to your blog which makes this style of contest very popular for bloggers.

These are just some of the benefits of running a contest on your blog.

I have run a couple of contests on this blog in the past and they have all been well received. I am currently planning a new contest that I hope to launch next week, so sign up to my RSS feed to be sure that you don’t miss out on that, if you are interested in being a sponsor for this contest then drop me an email.

Have you run contests on your blog? What style of contest do you prefer? What benefits do you get from running contests on your blog?

Image via CrunchBase

We all know the fantastic impact that social media has had – such as breaking news stories, keeping us “in the loop”, connecting people, making contacts, catching up with old friends etc – but it sadly hasn’t all been positive…which has left a fly (or should that be worm) in the social media ointment.

What am I prattling on about you may ask? Well, hackers and online scammers are unfortunately exploiting the popularity and trust in social networking to scam and hustle people on social media websites out of private information and even money. It has started to filter through to people that there is a spam problem, as you have probably seen status updates on Facebook from friends warning their mates about a virus or two.

But here are the Top 10 basic tips and pointers to stay safe when social networking;

1. Avoid clicking on links, but if you need to then hover over the link and ensure that they are going to respectable websites. Scammers use your friend’s profiles to post malicious links, so be careful.
2. Use strong passwords that features numbers and characters (*#$ etc). Do not use words.  Change your password regularly.
3. Run anti-virus software every couple of days.
4. Delete cookies regularly.
5. Don’t add people you don’t know – especially on Facebook – as scammers use fake profiles to spy on you. Twitter is different, as you will add lots of people you don’t know – but ensure the tweets look like a human is “tweeting” and get to know the person before clicking on their links. You can easily block people on Twitter and remove their ability to send you direct messages.
6. Be careful when using Wi-fi, as the security isn’t quite to the same level as a traditional connection. That’s not to say that you should avoid using it – but don’t click on links in your inbox or in text messages you have received.
7. Updates from friends that claim to be the video of the body of Osama Bin Laden or ‘My Ex-Girlfriend Cheated on me… Here is my revenge!’ posts (and a whole host of others) are spam. Don’t click on them and delete immediately.
8. Most sites have a “report spam/abuse” addresses if you suspect a post of being spam. Spammers do change (and get rid of) accounts regularly, but even so – it is essential to report suspicious activities.
9. Don’t enter your Facebook login anywhere other than Facebook.com.
10. Browse the security sections, such as http://twitter.com/about/security and http://www.facebook.com/security, just to keep you up-to-date and aware of things to avoid.

If you have been caught off-guard and think you have been attacked, immediately change your password, delete posts/uninstall the Facebook app, inform the website administrator that you suspect a post is spam, and run a virus scan on your computer.

James Brack writes regular commentary on current topics relating to SEO, social media security and computer and mobile phone forensics.

Over the past couple of days I laid out a challenge to my Twitter followers. The challenge:

Does Your Blog Load Faster Than My Blog?

After two days I am still yet to find anyone who has a blog that loads faster than mine.

While running the challenge I received a tweet from Melissa Reyes (follow her) asking me how I made my blog so fast:

@davidshawblog You’re right. Your blog loads 34% faster than mine (and I thought mine was fast). Damn. What are your “tricks”?

So, how did I get my blog so fast?

The truth is that I don’t have any special secret to making my blog super fast. The factor that I think is most important is that I only install plugins and features that I feel are neccessary.

It is very easy to get sucked in and install a whole wealth of plugins and most get put on and then forgotten about. I only install plugins that provide a purpose on my blog, if they offer no value then they get removed. Too many plugins is one of the most common factors for a slow blog.

I also don’t use an image heavy theme, my blog is very clean and has very few resources that have to be downloaded by my visitors, at the end of the day the content is the most important thing to my readers so I try not to distract them to much with unnecessary images.

Plugins. I only use two plugins to help improve the speed of my site, they are WP-cache and WP Smush.it. WP-cache creates static versions of my blogs pages and serves them to visitors instead of rendering the page for every visitor, this is great for reducing your blogs bandwidth.

WP Smush.it is a tool that you can use to compress the size of images on your blog. I always like to include images in my blog posts and this plugin allows me to optimize them to keep my blog nice and speedy.

Ad Code. I currently only run Puxee ads on my blog, these are mega fast so they don’t slow down my blog. Networks such as Adsense however are not so fast and can cause your blog to slow down in order to load the ads. Try and keep ads to a minimum, if you are using them make sure you are using a fast network.

Hosting. I use a well respected blog host called Hostgator and can honestly say I have never had a problem with them in the 6 years that I have been with them. I also believe that using a large well known host such as them is helping to speed up my blog as their servers are speedy and secure.

At the moment you can get 25% off with Hostgator if you sign up with the code ‘newblogger25′, so if you are looking to get a reliable and fast web host then I suggest you give them a go.

There you go, those are the ‘tricks’ that I use to make my blog super speedy.

So to continue the challenge:

Does Your Blog Load Faster Than My Blog?

Want to get involved and see if your blog is faster than mine? Take a speed test on http://whichloadsfaster.com put in your url on one side and mine on the other, at the top you will see a link for ‘repeat’, choose one of the options then race.

Share your results below, I am interested to see if anyone has a faster blog than me!

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

Every week I like to  share some love with fellow bloggers by linking to posts that I have enjoyed over the past seven days.

Here are a collection of my favourite posts from the past week:

• It’s Not Enough To Create Content On A Blog – Kikolani
• 10 Ways To Make Them Read Your Post (And Not Delete It) – We Blog Better
• Ad Hunting, Finding Business Opportunities – I Blog Zone
• What Do Facebook Tags Mean For Your Blog – Smart Bloggerz
• Twitter Addiction [Infographic] | Morning of a Twitter Addict – Live Your Love
• Four Social Media Questions (And Answers) – Spin Sucks

Just in case you missed it here is my post from the past week:

• 10 Great Ways To Build Your List

I am sure that most of you know about my startup Puxee. We are growing really well at the moment so if you are thinking about selling ad space or want to sell more ad space on your blog then sign up with us today.

I hope you all have a great week.

Image by Karin Beil via Flickr

I am sure many of you are aware an important part of blogging is building your email list.

I want to help you grow your list so that you can use it to drive traffic to your blog and to help you make money.

Most bloggers that I know use Aweber to manage their list, however I am using MailChimp as my newsletter manager, I suggest you check them out.

By having an email list you can stay connected with your subscribers and keep them informed about what is happening on your blog, it can also be used to recommend new products to your subscribers and earn commissions.

Once you are building your list here are 10 great ways to increase your subscribers:

1. Ask People To Subscribe – Tell people what they are subscribing for and what they will get out of it. People wont give away their email address without knowing what they will get in return.
2. Make Your Sign-up Form Visible – Have your sign-up form above the fold on your blog, so that it can be found easily.
3. Use Multiple Forms – Have more than one sign-up form on your blog, consider having one in your sidebar and one at the bottom of your blog posts. Aweber allows you to track the performance of each form so you can see which one converts best.
4. Word-of-mouth – Ask your existing subscribers to recommend your newsletter if they find it useful. This could be done every 6 months or so and has helped me boost my list by between 5-10% when used.
5. Give Something Away For Free – Many bloggers offer a free ebook in return for you signing up to their newsletter. A lot of people sign-up when there is something available for free. It does not have to be anything special but ebooks seem to be one of the most effective.
6. Contests – When running a contest on your blog, ask your contestants to subscribe to your list in return for points in the contest.
7. Create A Newsletter Page – Create a page dedicated to getting people to sign up to your list. You can then link to this when promoting your list, such as on Twitter. See my Newsletter Page.
8. Make It Easy – Don’t ask for endless amount of information. Make it quick and easy to sign-up.
9. Link To Newsletter Page On Guest Posts – When you do a guest post on another blog, as well as linking back to your blog in your bio also include a link to your newsletter page (see #7).
10. Get Reviewed – Asking other bloggers in your niche to recommend your blog and your newsletter can be a great way of building your list as people are often more likely to act after reading a good review.

These are just 10 ways that you can build your email list. If you have not already done so then please sign up for my newsletter.

How do you build your list? What is your most effective method?