We all need to be Validated, but how do you Validate others?  Leave a comment with how you Validate others.

The process of uploading an image was very simple, and you can upload images up to 3.5MB.   They support jpg, png, and gif formats and if you are very busy like I always seem to be, you can upload multiple images with one click, talk about easy.   I have become a huge fan of sharing images, where I wasn’t before, and it must be because the other image hosting websites have limitations, on bandwidth or have ads all over the page, not the case with Pict.com.

If you are looking a service that will let you upload and share your images with a simple click? The Look no further, there are no more confusing instructions and/or complicated procedures, everyone enjoys a one-click feature! With no more bandwidth limitations  like Photobucket or Google Pages, So Yes Go enjoy the unlimited bandwidth! To top it off there are no more sponsored ads like at Imageshack.

Ok here the skinny:

I tested it by uploading some photos I had saved on my computer and the uploading process was quick and the photo quality was Great, very clean. You just need to click the “Upload image” button,  then choose the photo file on your computer, then open it, wait for about 3 to 7 seconds and that’s it. Tadaha! You can also upload images from an url if you prefer.

Time to Share

Simple! To share the images that you have uploaded,  just move your mouse over the specific image and “Share it link”.  The sharing feature allows you to show the image to your friends via ICQ, AOL, IRC …, you can insert the image to your blog … or where ever!

It is my humble opinion that Pict.com is a great image hosting go check them out!

Anyone that’s ever blogged as a way to promote their products or services and, hopefully, make money online knows how effective good blogs can be. However, for them to be truly effective, they need good exposure on the internet. MyBlogLog, a service of Yahoo! makes this not only possible but very easy.

MyBlogLog is a social network service used in the blogging community. A lot of its effectiveness comes from the addition of a web widget installed on the bloggers blog. MyBlogLog membership is free, which makes it even more popular for bloggers hoping to get more interested readers and exposure. When you sign up for a MyBlogLog account, you enter your blog and are starting your own blog community for your particular interest. Other readers that are interested in your blog can subscribe to your community, so they’ll always know when something new is posted. They can also share your posts with contacts in their own blogging community.

Bloggers that have installed web widgets on their site will be able to show other members of the MyBlogLog community who have recently viewed their site. The widgets also allow you to connect with other users by providing links to the other member’s pages in their community. The members that use the widgets are privy to a lot of helpful information such as how many people visited your site, who visited it, what links they may have clicked and their origin. You can also find new communities by typing what you’re looking for in a search box.

If you’re interested in finding out about any new members to MyBlogLog, a list of the new members is shown on the MyBlogLog Communities or Members page. This is a great way to find if there are any new members with similar interests as yours. By looking at what tags have been put on their profile and checking out their communities, you can find many “friends” to view your community and help with the promotion of your stories or sites.

If you already have a Yahoo! ID, you’re well on your way. Once your Yahoo! Profile is set up, add a photo and you’re ready to start blogging. Any time you go to a site that’s MyBlogLog enables, your photo will show up on a widget. All the other user has to do is click on your picture and they can see all you’ve written or posted. You can also add different communities to your blog and learn what others’ are reading and find out whose reading your stuff.

How do you keep it fresh?

If you’re blogging as a way to make money online, which is the reason most people blog, the most important part of your blogs is, obviously, your content. In the same way that a store is going to need customers to stay in business, your blog site needs a steady flow of traffic to remain active and help your online business. Keeping your content fresh is the most important thing to remember when blogging, regardless of the reason for blogging. In fact, having fresh content on your website or blog is the key to success with your online business. Here are a few tips on the best ways to keep your content fresh.

Use Keywords

Using search engine optimization (SEO) through the use of keywords is one of the best ways to generate traffic towards your website or blog. What’s even more important is using keywords that are relevant to your blog site so they’ll show up quickly on search engines. Search engines are what interested readers will use to find websites that are similar to their interests. If your site consists of several different pages, make sure you use different keywords for each page so the chances of them getting to your site will be better. The higher your site shows up on search engine results, the more traffic you’ll get to your site.

Although the idea of having fresh content on your blog all the time may seem difficult, if not impossible, there are ways you can do this if you have a plan from day one and do everything possible to stick to it. Determine the frequency of your posting or, more specifically, how often you will make posts to your blog. If you have time to make posts on a daily basis, this is great. Not everyone, due to work schedules, can do this every day but if you can, it’ll be very beneficial to your blog. Once you’ve determined what your frequency is going to be, let your readers know. This is important for two reasons. One, if they come to your blog and see nothing new, they’ll know when they can expect to see something new. If your content is good, they’ll start to look forward to this day or time. Second, by making a commitment such as this to your readers, you’re also making a goal for yourself and making yourself accountable. When you know you have to do something, it’s much easier to get it done.

Plan Ahead

Don’t be too hard on yourself if something comes up where you can’t make your post as planned. This does happen to everyone at some point, whether they’re unavailable, sick or just don’t have the motivation. Many blogging systems offer an option where you can schedule your posts in advance. This option will come in very handy if you know of something that is going to prevent you from making your regular post.

Blogging is NOT just about Blogging

Never stop researching and looking for new content you can post to your blog. Even though you may feel you know everything there is to know about your topic, there is always something new to learn. Your readers will love hearing about these new things and may have feedback and comments to add to them. Don’t just rely on the internet for your research, however, as you can learn a lot just in your day-to-day living. With the use of cell phones with cameras, you can take interesting shots throughout the day that you may want to share with your readers. Readers also enjoy looking at photos. Just make sure they’re saved in the right size and format so they won’t take forever to open.

Find small items and topics that you can add on a weekly or even a daily basis. While the main topic of your blog may be something larger, you can always break it down into small topics to keep them interested. For instance, if your site is about photography, which is a broad topic, once a week you can have individual feeds about smaller photography-related topics such as filters, lens, film, etc. These small topics or subjects will serve two purposes. They’ll allow your content to remain fresh while giving your readers even more interesting topics to read and enjoy.

Don’t be afraid to add some humor into your blogs. Although most of the readers are there to participate and possibly learn more about your topic, no one wants to feel they’re back in high school in a classroom. Put a friendly and light spin on some of your posts, which will also help you to develop a friendly relationship with your readers. Encourage them to contact you and let them know that you look forward to hearing from them. A contact form can be located somewhere on your blog and encourage readers to leave any comments or feedback they may have. Make sure you respond back to any of the comments you receive so they’ll know that there is a real live person behind the blog and that you care about them. The more contact there is between you and your readers, the better your chance of getting new content from them as well.

Your new content doesn’t have to be some long drawn-out article. It can be a short post of only 250-300 words but it lets them know that you are available and it will keep them interested. Even though your blog site is about a specific topic, don’t be afraid to add some “evergreen” topics occasionally. Evergreen topics are general interest topics that never change but yet will draw their interest. They don’t even have to be related to your blog subject but they can still be interesting. You may even consider finding some private label rights articles where you can get some great ideas. But, DO NOT COPY THEM.

Get rid of any old content that has just been sitting around there taking up space. You should do this regularly, like every other month. Keep an archive, however, so readers can always go back and find something that interested them that they may want to retrieve. An archive will also allow new readers to see that you’ve been doing this for quite awhile and that you blog is not new. This will do a lot towards proving your seriousness and credibility.

Pay attention to the seasons and holidays of the year. People will love your acknowledgment and it will go a long ways towards letting them know your content is fresh. Again, they don’t have to be long posts. It’s quality and not quantity that counts.

1. Pump Out Better Content

Before you do anything else, take a look at your content if it sucks, there is your answer to why you don’t have traffic.   A blog post consists of several elements which are the title and the body copy.  Most new bloggers fail to realize that blog headlines are so important they could make or break their blog.

Before your visitors read your content, they’d have to read the headline first. Writing a poor and uninspiring headline could result in you losing the majority of your visitors.  Lets me give you an example: which of the following headline would you likely click? Leave you choice in the comments.

1. Popular blogs by Technorati
2. 50 Most Influential Blogs

The second element that you have to pay attention to is of course the body copy. Here’s a tip, you don’t need to produce good content with a perfect grammar and so on.

You just have to write posts that your readers want to read.  See, when it comes to blogging, it is often not about what you want but what your readers want.  While you might not be the best writer in town, that doesn’t stop many people from visiting your blog daily.

2. Optimize, Optimise, Optimise

As time goes by, it’s becoming increasing difficult to get your blog listed high up in the search engine results.  While you can perform some on page search engine optimizations which undoubtedly are important, but it won’t guarantee a good ranking because obviously the external factors play a much bigger role these days.

Off page optimization factors include anything from the number of sites linking to your blog, the anchor text used by those sites that are linking to you, primarily your Google PageRank and so on. They all influence your ultimate ranking on the search engines.

While you can’t directly adjust the external factors to your advantage, you can do things such as improving your blog content (my first point), attracting links from other blogs and making your blog more social by participating in the comments.

3. Link are link handshakes

Again, this comes back to your content. You are more likely to attract links from other bloggers if you offer something that people want to read and more importantly want to share with their readers, thus saying they agree or find interesting your content.  The online handshake.   You should also be lining out to others great content.

Also bear in mind that not all links are created equal.  Those that will benefit you most are links from trusted, authoritative, high PageRank’d sites, links that use relevant keywords in their anchor text, links from relevant sites, and links from variety of sources instead of just from one or two of your own sites for instance.   I’m Blogging That… What are you blogging?

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With the internet such a large part of our lives today, more and more individuals are using it as a way to make money online. They’re choosing to sell items they no longer use or items they’re trying to market. Many are even starting online businesses to make money online. The key to having a successful online business is in the advertising and using advertising to draw traffic to your website. Blogging has become very popular as a way to meet people that share your interests and to get them to help promote your website and products. The effectiveness of your website has a lot to do with how successful you’ll be at your business and how many sales you’ll make. This is where the Alexa rating comes in very handy as a tool to measure how successful you are with your website. After all, your website is there to help you make money online so make is as successful as you can.

What Alexa is All About

Alexa is a company that was started in 1996 with the purpose of learning more about the internet and how to observe the different sites as well as which ones were popular and how many visitors come to each site. Alexa uses their major tool, called the Alexa toolbar, to help them make their determinations and Alexa ratings, which are also very helpful in determining the success of your website as well as your blogging sites. The goal you will hope to achieve is to have a higher Google page rank but a lower Alexa ranking. Surprising as this may be, the lower you Alexa ranking will be, the more successful you website is in terms of traffic coming to your site. Statistics show that the websites that have sold the most products are those with the lowest Alexa ranking.

The Alexa Toolbar

The Alexa toolbar is available all over the internet and can easily be installed as part of your web browser. When used regularly, it will give you all the information you need regarding what sites are popular and are being viewed regularly. The Alexa toolbar can only be effective if you use it for information but can really help you to know how your website or blog sites are being viewed. All you have to do is go to a site or type in the name and you’ll be given all the pertinent information about this site including its traffic ranking and if the ranking has increased or decreased. Although it currently is not compatible with Windows Vista, the current issues are being worked on so soon it may be available with all Windows platforms.

Tech-no-rati?

With Blogging becoming very popular in the internet world today, although it may be done for different reasons.  Some people blog on several different blogging posts just for fun and to meet new people that share their interests. Others, however, are blogging as a way to make money online.  These are the individuals that have to spend more time and energy having the right blogging methods so their blogs or advertisements show up more on the internet.  Blogs can be given certain rating points based on how effective they are.  Two popular ratings are Technorati rating and Alexa rating (I’ll cover this in a follow up post).  Let’s get into what this ratings represent so we can work on ways to improve them.

We’re all familiar with search engines such as Yahoo or Google.  When you’re searching for something you type it in a Google search engine.  Hundreds and typically thousands of results are going to show up for you.  The results that show up on top are usually said to be the most effective or “highest ranked”.  How high they rank on the search engines has to do with the proper keyword usage, etc.  SEO (search engine optimization) has a lot to do with making your ads show up on top of the search engine results so users see them first. The same principles go with blogging as a way to make money online.

Technorati is to blogging what Google ranks are to search engines. The world of blogging can easily be described as the “blogosphere” and Technorati is a tracker of the millions of blogs that are posted each day on the blogosphere.  It keeps track of which blogs are linking to other blog sites, etc.  It then ranks the blogs in the same way as Google ranks the results of Google search engines.  There are ways that you can increase your Technorati ranking so your blog links will show up quicker for others to see.  It’s important to remember that your Technorati ranking is not based on how many viewers you have to your blog but more on the number of incoming links your blog receives.  Known as “blog reactions”, they refer to the number of blogs that have linked to yours over a certain period of time.

With the millions of blogs being posted out there, a goal for your blogs should be a ranking of less than 50,000, obviously the lower the better.  Having a good relationship with other blog sites and bloggers is a great way to improve your Technorati ranking.  The Technorati page can give you many helpful suggestions on improving your own ranking, starting with exchanging links with other blog posts, I’m Blogging That… What are you blogging?

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What is a Blog?

Blogging can be a very successful way to make money online.  If you have a website, as most online business owners do, you’ll want to use every available measure to draw as much traffic your way as possible, whether you are selling a product or service or simply selling yourself or your point of view.  Blogging has become quite popular as a means to do this.  Although blogging originally started as a way to meet people and make friends, almost like a chat room, today blogging is a major form of generating traffic to websites to make money online. If you’re unfamiliar with blogs, a blog is a website where items are posted every day or on a regular basis.  Starting a blog, keeping up with it and adding regular articles to it is referred to as blogging.  Each individual item or article that’s added is called a blog post or just post.  A blogger is the person adding the posts.  Blogs may consist of images, text, hypertext and links to other files, websites, audio or videos.  Adding links is how most business owners generate traffic to their sites to get more potential customers.

Is Blogging For You?

Blogging sounds like a lot of fun and a great way to make friends.  However, if you’re doing it for business purposes to help you make money online, you need to take some things into consideration before deciding if blogging is right for you because it’s not the thing for everyone.  For instance, not everyone enjoys writing and unless you do, you won’t be very successful at blogging.  Bloggers have to add posts to their blogs on a regular basis or they’ll lose their viewers.  You also need to have the time to devote to making regular posts to the blog.  Another thing to consider is that you’ll be the “star” of the blog or the center of attention. You need to be the kind of person that’s not bothered by this.  You also need to be a “people person”.  While this may be a virtual relationship as opposed to a face to face relationship, you still have to be an agreeable and friendly person to truly allow your blogging to help you make money online with your business.

Blogs Need Useful Content

Although you may feel that, when blogging, you can write whatever you choose because you don’t know the people that are reading it, nothing could be further from the truth. This is especially true if you’re using blogging to help promote your self or your business so you can make money online. Your content needs to be unique and interesting and be of such that your audience can’t get from any other blog sites. If you can’t do this, you’ll soon lose all your readers. The best advice I can give you if you’re new to blogging is to find out what your audience wants and give it to them. So I’m Blogging That … What are you Blogging?

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I have a friend who 5 years ago started a Business with his Father-in-Law.  They have done well together as they balance each others strength’s and weaknesses.  It has been a good business experience for both of them.  Then one day he makes the mistake of cheating on his wife, with his secretary.  It was going on for a year prior to him confessing his Guilt to his wife.  Now they are in a Race to try and take the business from each other because they will not work together anymore.

How often do we jeopardize a great business opportunity or success with our own selfish desires.  I think a lot more than we want to admit.

Bankrupt the business

I have another friend who owns a potentially successful business in the Electronics industry.  The business sells on average $1.5Million every year.  With descent margins this company should be a success.  However, they are marginally successful, due to the owner spending the company into debt prior to it profiting.

Get Over yourself!

It is easy to look at these stories and see what these two stories illustrate as a silly mistake.  But what are you doing in our own business that is keeping you from developing it to be the best it can be?  Are you being lazy? Prideful? or impatient?  It could be as little as daydreaming too much or spending the money you haven’t made yet.  Whatever it may be seems to always be related to SELFISHNESS!!

How has Selfishness affected your business? I’m Blogging That… What are you Blogging?

Wow!  Holy Crap Batman!

I am certainly amazed that in a couple of days the number of subscribers to my RSS feed has increased by nearly 100 and the number of twitter followers has almost hit 100!  Ok we are at 51 as of right now but i like to celebrate so as a push to hit 300 RSS subscribers and 100 Twitter followers, I am throwing out a contest.  I mean what would the point be if there was no party at the end of a goal, it would just be another crap chore, yeah and blogging should never be a chore, if it gets to that point, STOP!  Take a break and come back to it later, but it should not ever be a chore.  While sometimes it is difficult to get the right post idea out, that is bloggers block and isn’t something that you dread.

Contest details.

• Every one who is following me on Twitter will get 1 entry.
• Every one who is following me via my RSS feed will get 2 Entries.
• Everyone who mentions this contest and leave a trackback will get 7 entries

The winner will be selected within 24 hours of reaching 100 twitter followers and the RSS feed hitting 300, so time is running against you.  The winner will get a website/blog review posted here as a thanks for participating.  What are you waiting for?  Go Enter!