After all, I’m getting ready to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my 37th birthday (you do the math), so of course, anything that seems like it’s age-related is just jumping out at me.

So the headline “Is blogging a slog? Some young people think so” hit me almost as hard as the ma’ams do when I’m out buying groceries.

According to a study done by a group at Harvard, kids just aren’t finding blogging cool anymore. Since they’re all so busy texting away, their forms of communication have also become a lot shorter.

Instead of putting their efforts into maintaining blog entries, they’re putting their thoughts, aspirations and advertising copy out there on places like Twitter, where they can do them in 140 character bits, rather than on websites that require more work and time.

But just what is everyone tweeting about? The best tweets — and the ones that get re-tweeted — are about, you guessed it, blogs.

So even with this disheartening news about the younger Internet users turning to quicker takes for more instant gratification, is there still room for good blogging?

Of course there is. Because, with all the quickness and immediacy of tweeting and texting, there remains one thing missing — great content.

After all, while you can get your points out there really fast with a quick text, there really isn’t room for much more than a few words by doing that.

How can you share your political thoughts, your how-tos, or even a great recipe for homemade salsa when you’re limiting yourself to just a few choice words?

According to the article, younger people haven’t entirely abandoned blogging. They’re still using it for working purposes. However, the thrill has gone for those users, and they’re turning to more immediate communications and video to communicate their most pressing issues.

So how do we bring it all together again? The answer is simple — take a look at your blog and see if it’s keeping up with the times.

Are your posts way too long? Are you taking forever to get to the point?

And when you’re writing, are you paying close attention to what someone could grab onto and retweet? Or are you just going on and on about subjects that nobody really cares about but you?

When was the last time you updated your blog? I mean really updated it? When did you make your graphics easy to use? Include a video or a game that readers would find entertaining?

And are you using those new-fangled ways to communicate yourself? Do you have a Twitter account? They’re great for contacting other professionals in your field, and for putting the word out there yourself about what you’ve written.

Keeping your blogs exciting does take a lot of work. However, abandoning the use of a good blog is a big mistake. After all, we all have something to share — and blogs give all of us a great opportunity to share what we know with the world.

Is blogging really just for old timers?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The 20 page eBook is a great introduction into how you can build a name for yourself and make money though guest posting.

In the Ebook you will learn:

• How to guest post
• Guest posting problems and how to avoid them
• How to generate post ideas

If you are looking to make money through guest posting or build traffic to your blog through it I recommend checking the course out. It is being sold just now for an introductory price of $10 but this price will go up soon

Link : Guest Posting Mini Course

Guest Posting for Quality Links and Targeted Traffic


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The course has a massive 24 training modules, ranging from basic tutorials to more advanced techniques. Each section has a range of articles, podcasts, video tutorials and interviews. The content has been written by some of the most well known marketers in the industry such as Michael Gray, Yaro Starak, Chris Garrett, Neil Patel and Zac Johnson.

Module List

1. Business Principles
2. Domain Names
3. Website Setup
4. Markets & Niches
5. Business Models
6. WordPress
7. Web Design
8. Blogging
9. Keyword Research
10. Online Forums
11. Online Stories
12. Web Content
13. Basic SEO
14. Advanced SEO
15. Link Building
16. Traffic Generation
17. Web Metrics
18. Social Media
19. Selling Advertising
20. Email Marketing
21. Affiliate Marketing
22. Pay Per Click
23. Landing Pages
24. Selling Your Products

The course costs $392, payable in 4 installments of $98. You will get lifetime access to all of the content once the 4th payment has been made.

There are only 300 spots available, so if you are interested in joining up I recommend doing so quickly as these spots will probably sell out within the next few days. There are a lot of online marketing programs on the web today though Online Profits is one you should seriously consider since it covers such a wide range of topics and has support from many industry leaders.

To find out more please visit the sales page via the link below.

Link : Online Profits

Online Profits Opens Up Membership


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The pay per click ads look similar to Google Adsense except the sites logo is displayed at the left hand side as well (a 64×64 pixel icon).

The BSA Pemium option is still in beta. Currently this ad option is only available to Web Design and Web Development sites with the minimum purchase being $2,500.

Both options are still in a beta phase but I don’t expect it will be too long until these options are rolled out to everyone, which will give different ways of selling ads on your blog.

Links:

• Announcing BSA Premium and Pay Per Click
• Official Press Release

BuySellAds Announce Premium and Pay Per Click Programs


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

On three occasions, I have been asked by the blog I was writing for to contact the company that was discussed in my post and get their comments ahead of publication.  Since I did not have a contact at these companies, I first had to figure out who to try and contact.  Then I had to wait to hear back.  In the first case I never heard back and the blog never ran my article.  In the second case I never heard back, but the blog ran my article after waiting a week.  In the third case I was able to use the name of the blog I was writing for and actually got a response – albeit little more than “no comment, Mr. small fry.”

This is the challenge that has led to the founding of Plato’s forms by Darryl Siry (CEO) and Ben Metcalfe (CTO).  The company has just received 545,000 in seed money and plans its first product for journalists and corporate communications professionals in the Spring of 2010.

The investment provides some credence that Plato’s Forms is on to something, but at this point since they have no demo I am more intrigued by the idea than any reality.  The idea is simple, responsible bloggers want to get input from the companies they are writing about.  Many companies are willing to talk to a journalist and add commentary to the story the journalist is writing.  However, while companies can staff to respond to a limited number of newspaper, magazine or TV reporters, few have the resources to respond to every blogger. Plato’s Forms hopes to offer that communication pipeline – a way to allow a responsible blogger to reach a company and vica-versa.

Plato’s Forms is selling itself to investors as “a professional messaging platform focused on solving the problem of rapid proliferation of misinformation in online media.”  I will be keeping an eye on this start-up (check out their blog), but only time will tell if they can truly help connect bloggers and companies in a meaningful manner.

Can Plato’s Forms add Wisdom to Blogging?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The new form generator lets you customise the form more easily. In the past Aweber users had to generate a standard form and then customise the form and it’s surrounding area themselves. Not any more! The new generator lets you choose from a variety of templates and lets you enter text in the header and footer too.

Check out the video below to see how easy the generator is to use.

In total there are 70 templates which you can choose for your forms at the moment, ranging from designs like fitness, automotive and travel. You can change the colours of every template and as usual, you can decide what fields are included in the form too.

Below is a custom form I knocked in a minute up for the BloggingTips Newsletter.

I’m really impressed with this new generator. It makes creating great looking forms quick and easy and allows those without good design skills to present a professional image on their blog without having to hire a designer. If you use Aweber for your blogs newsletter, I recommend signing in and trying the new generator out.

Link : Have a Look at the New Web Form Generator

Aweber Announce New Point and Click Web Form Generator


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

I’ve seen a few different reactions to this decision this week but the general consensus seems to be that most bloggers think this is a good move.

Disclosure

I’ve only wrote a few paid reviews for Blogging Tips however all of these reviews have been fully disclosed to readers to make sure that they understood a payment was received for reviewing it. In my opinion, that’s the only way to do things.

I really don’t think it is in any bloggers benefit to sell out their readers and recommend a poor product in exchange for a gift or cash payment as they will quickly lose their integrity. And if the readers of a blog don’t trust the owner, they are very unlikely to purchase any products or services from them (and might unsubscribe too).

I know everyone doesn’t think this way though. I’ve read many positive reviews of products and services which I knew were very poor, but nothing was disclosed within the review so we have to assume that the review was unbiased.

Some advertisers aren’t too keen on disclosure either. I’ve had a few advertisers back out after I told them that all paid reviews had to have a message at the end saying the review was paid for.

Who does the new FTC Rule affect?

How pro-active will the FTC be in enforcing this new rule? It is highly unlikely that they will waste their time targeting bloggers with a few hundred readers, or even a few thousand. It is more likely that this rule was introduced to generally discourage biased reviews and to make it easier for them to fine high profile bloggers and celebrities who break the rules.

Though is it possible for them to effectively enforce it anyway? Surely every product recommendation isn’t going to come under scrutiny, it just isn’t practical. I think it will remain fairly easy for people to give positive reviews if everything is under the radar i.e. if they are not blatant about it.

Perhaps I’m being negative. I do welcome this new rule as it discourages biased reviews, but I believe this doesn’t really affect the majority of us as it’s only high profile celebrities and bloggers which will be under the spotlight.

What do you think about this new rule?

Related Link : FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials : Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements

* Thanks to DaneBlogger, who brought this news story to my attention on Monday

Does the new FTC Rule affect you?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The space for self-publishing is getting lots of investment right now with a handful of other companies trying to change the world of self-publishing. You have WattPad an e-book sharing company, Vook, which tries to blend books and video and Lulu which is the most similar to FastPencil.  If you get serious about self publishing each is worth a look, even if it is just to gather ideas.

FastPencil sports a 4 step process and it is the 1st step, connect that is the most unique.  FastPencil is integrated with both Facebook Connect and Twitter to provide for communication and collaboration. The “scribble, tweet or share” feature automatically updates Twitter making it easier to share your thoughts and activities with your community.  At any time during the creative process writers can invite their social network, fellow authors and FastPencil experts to review and provide comments on the book.

Using FastPencil you can write, you can format text, you can add images, and you can track revisions and word count.  There are links to handy references like a a dictionary and even Wikipedia.  The interface is easy to use and matches their goal which co-founder Michael Ashley notes as “We’re building the tool simple enough so that someone like my mom could use it, but complicated enough that a professional really could author books and publish, distribute and promote them.”  The Blog to Book import feature is one that could be attractive if you have lots of content on you existing blog.

When you’re finally ready to publish, FastPencil walks you through a long list of features and settings you can control, including legal considerations, your ISBN, the covers, the size and templates, the spine, and even the price.  FastPencil eliminates traditional barriers to publishing and enables authors to sell their work directly to their particular audience.  Additional publishing packages include consulting, author and editorial services, custom formatting and distribution.

There is no minimum run-rate, so you can publish one copy or 1,000 copies, and you’re free to sell the books on Amazon.com — although FastPencil will take a revenue share.  The company even publishes to Kindle if you think that an e-book is your marketplace.  So, if you are considering self-publishing and want a good place to start, then FastPencil can help turn that book idea into a reality. I am only dabbling in the writing phase of FastPencil, but so far I have liked everything I have seen – but no publications … yet!

FastPencil Self Publishing


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

I am happy to announce that the new ProBlogger Discussion Forum is now live. The forum costs $1.95 a month (which is much less than I thought it would cost). Since I signed up to receive updates about the site, I was lucky enough to find out about the community earlier today. So I’ve been able to hang out in the forum and check it out for you guys.

ProBlogger Forum

Firstly, I need to point out that the site isn’t officially live per say. The website did launch today and Darren has twittered about it however he has not announced it on ProBlogger as yet so that any bugs can be ironed out over the next few days. So for all intents and purposes, this can be considered a beta launch.

As I write this, around 450 people have signed up to the forum today and nearly all of them have posted already, which gives the impression of an established forum rather than one which was only online a few hours.

Maybe it’s not possible to give a fair review of a forum after one day but my first impressions of this new community have been nothing but positive. Perhaps it’s because it’s a private forum but there is a real sense of community, a real sense that everyone wants to help their fellow members out.

The forum seems to have a good mix already of complete newbies and experienced bloggers and everyone seems to be getting on well. And since the forum requires a subscription, it doesn’t attract spammers who pointlessly reply to any thread just so that their website is linked in their signature.

There are 9 forum rooms in total including those you would find on other web development forums like blog design, promotion, writing etc. Without doubt my favourite room is the Collaboration room, a place where you can meet like minded bloggers for joint projects, networking and so on.

I know that there is always going to be a large percentage of people who are not keen on paying for any website on the internet. However, I have no doubt in my mind that this small cost will prove to be a bargain. For less than $25 a year you can get advice from hundreds of experienced bloggers and get the chance to develop good relationships with them too.

At the moment the forum is incredibly busy with around 450 members. It wouldn’t surprise me if the member base exceeded 5,000 after Darren announces it on ProBlogger, which would make it without doubt the number 1 forum for bloggers to hang out.

I recommend visiting ProBlogger.com and checking out Darrens welcome video. Also, if you are going to sign up, I encourage you to do so sooner rather than later; as the $1.95 monthly price seems to be a limited offer. As an added bonus, members can get the Pro Blogger WorkBook at half price too.

If you see me over there, remember to say hello

Link : ProBlogger Forum

ProBlogger Community Launched


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

31 Days to Build a Better Blog

This massive 94 page workbook contains 31 unique tasks to help you build a better blog. The month long training will give you lots of ideas on how you can improve your blogs traffic and income levels. I have no doubt that your blog will have traffic at the end of the month (Apparently, it has sold over 15,000 copies already!)

To get this 50% discount all you need to do is enter the discount code probloggeris5 in the shopping cart area and then click update cart for a discount of $9.98.

Link : 31 Days to Build a Better Blog

ProBlogger Workbook reduced to $9.97 for 24 hours


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The first big adopter of this element is Wordpress.com, which just turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com to use the RSS Cloud.  In reality this does not mean all that much yet as there’s only one reader, River2, that has support for the RSS cloud.  However, expectations are that RSS clients will soon add support for this new feature.  There is a description of this process on the RSSCloud website if you want to see all the details.

The blog at WordPress.com notes that this is just the beginning of real time support and soon they are “going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else.”

Speaking of pubsubhubbub, it is actually somewhat a competitor to the RSS Cloud idea.  RSS clients that speak the pubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications when a blog  they’re interested in is updated. With Google Reader supporting pubsubhubbub and WordPress.com supporting the RSS Cloud – it will be interesting to see if the big players support both options of if we are seeing the start of a format war.

Regardless of whether we get one format or two formats, it looks like blog posts (and maybe comments too) will soon be available in real time.

Real Time Blogging with the RSS Cloud


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The book details what Daniel has learned in the last 4 years. In that time Daniel has managed to go from someone with no blogging experience to one of the leading authorities in the blogging niche. He now earns 6 figures annually from the several blogs he owns so it’s fair to say that he knows what he’s talking about!

Here is a list of things which are covered in the book:

• The three mistakes that bloggers make when choosing a niche.
• The three characteristics of good content.
• Why your content strategy should have one cornerstone.
• The two factors that create magnetic headlines (and how to apply them).
• A deadly mistake that bloggers make when designing their blogs.
• Practical tips that you can use to network efficiently.
• A promotional strategy that most people forget to use.
• The two requirements for making money with Google AdSense.
• The best trick available to make money with CPM deals.

To get the ebook, all you have to do is sign up for the Daily Blog Tips newsletter (which is free). I downloaded the book today and was very impressed.

My only criticism of the book (if you can call it that) is that the title is a bit misleading. When I read the title of the book I had the impression that the book concentrated solely on how to make money through your blog though this is not the case. The last chapter does concentrate on this subject though the majority of the book deals with topics such as writing good content, blog promotion and usability concerns.

So in my opinion the book should be considered as a general guide to blogging, though I guess it could be argued that you cannot make money with a blog unless you apply the techniques used in the first 4 chapters. And compared to other general blogging e-books, Daniel doesn’t get too technical, preferring to talk more about the theory and application of certain techniques rather than tediously explain how you do basic things step by step.

I encourage you all to download Make Money Blogging. It has a lot of great tips and useful information within it and I’m sure that you will all benefit from reading it.

Recommended

Link : Make Money Blogging

Free Make Money Blogging Ebook


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

There are thousands of blogs listed within 500 categories. A summary of the latest news is displayed and when you select the article you are taken to the original source blog.

Have a look at the video below to see the application in action:

Regator is free to download though a premium version with more features is being released in the future.

I have an Android phone but I also have an Apple Touch mp3 player so was able to try it the application out. It works pretty well though this application should not be considered as a replacement for your RSS newsreader as you cannot define what blogs are your favourites, add new blogs or personalise it in any way (though you can apparently do this in the premium version). Also, you cannot view blog posts in full, you can only view excerpts.

However, it is a quick and easy way to view the latest news from thousands of popular blogs and in that respect, it is a very useful application. Worth trying out if you have an iPhone.

Link : Regator iPhone Application (application requires 383 kb of space)

Put The Blogosphere In Your Pocket With Regator


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

With the recent

Matt explains that it is different from services such as TinyURL in a few ways:

• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
• These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink.
• It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
• WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

WordPress.com bloggers should now see a ‘Get Shortlink‘ button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post.

I love how this is integrated right into the post editor. Apparently, self hosted WordPress users can use this too if they have the stats plugin (thanks to Greg Falken for pointing this out).

Link : WP.me — shorten your links

Shorten your urls with WP.me


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Let’s briefly consider the life spans of the newspaper and the blog to begin to look towards the future.

The Roots of Blogging

While there there is no official start date for the blogging revolution, the earliest form of blogging dates back to 1997.  On December 17th 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” when he described the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that “logged” all the Internet sites he visited.  Then in October of 1998, Open Diary launched with software to make reader commenting available to a wide audience.  The software continued to develop and in 2003, with the release of both TypePad and WordPress, blogging began to explode.

The Deep Roots of the Newspaper

The newspaper story began some five centuries ago in Europe where merchants would distribute hand written newsletters containing information about the the weather, economic conditions and usually wars.  In this study of changing media – it’s interesting to note that the same topics are still featured in today’s newspapers.  While the technology of how we communicate new has evolved – in many ways the content of the news has evolved very little over the centuries.

The newspaper industry expanded worldwide and many will say that it reached its peak in the early 1970s when two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down a United States President. But the following decades have not been kind to the newspaper industry and amidst the worldwide recession and the rapid growth of blogs, the newspaper is now an endangered species.

What are the signs of a fading media?

Today many a blog is being written about the death of the newspaper and many are criticizing the newspaper industry for failing to adapt to the changing market conditions.  I wonder if blogging will, like the newspaper, last for more than 500 year or if someday soon the successor to the blog will have the last laugh talking about how bloggers failed to adapt to changing market conditions.

Personally, I think that blogging will survive for decades to come – but the world can’t support 184 million blogs – there just are not enough people with enough time to read to support that many blogs.  This really hit home as I have been helping with the social media for a large Children’s Festival.  The Festival organizers want to tap into the blogosphere and get more publicity.  However, as I search for blogs to work with I have been amazed how many of the mommy blogs, family activity blogs and parenting blogs are essentially dormant.  I am finding the vast majority of the blogs have had less than 2 posts in 2009.

The “Have” Blogs and the “Have Not” Blogs

Just like in society where you have a limited number of people with LOTS of money and masses of people looking to make more money – I see the same happening to the world of blogs.  The few, the mighty and the strong blogs will survive and thrive – but the age of blogging offering everybody a voice will fade away.  Hopefully, bloggers reading blogs with great ideas like Blogging Tips will be among the survivors – but it will take hard work to gain the traffic to keep your blog at the top of the blogging heap.

I wonder what blogging tips and analytics tips bloggers are using to make sure that they stay ahead of the curve and can build a blog that might someday rival the giant tortoise of the giants of newspaper for longevity.

500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/