If you’re happy with a small audience that shapes up as something similar to that shown in this infographic, and that is sometimes the case for low-key, personal bloggers, then you can feel free to surf away from this article now. If, on the other hand, you’re a blogger looking to take the next step to a bigger audience, guest blogging may be just what you need to get that extra burst of targeted traffic.

Guest blogging is the act of publishing your content on a competitor’s blog in the interest of gaining valuable exposure with new readers and on new platforms. Here are a few easy steps to help you get started with guest blogging:

1. Seek out the top bloggers in your niche

Guest blogging on a blog less visited than your own obviously won’t do much to increase your readership and so it’s important that you take the time to identify the absolute best bloggers in your niche. Once you determine the best of the best, make contact and see if they may be interested in having you contribute a guest post.

2. Create well-written content that is enjoyable to read

Enjoyable content is content that not only provides the reader with the information that they are seeking, but makes obtaining that information a pleasant experience, leaving the reader with a mind to return for more in the future. In the interest of having your article approved for publishing and reaping the rewards, make this post the single best you’ve written to date!

3. Take advantage

The idea behind guest posting is giving your blog a boost in traffic so begin work right away to capture those added visitors, making them loyal, returning readers well into the future.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

3 Ways to Get Started With Guest Blogging

What do you have to do to build a successful blog? (Image © sellingpix - Fotolia.com)

Do you know that successful blogs share the same characteristics? Do you want to know the secret of a successful blog? How can it generate massive traffic and keep multiplying that traffic day after day? How can it generate massive profits to its owner? Here are 5 most important characteristics of a successful blog:

1) Successful Blog Entertains the Readers

If you have good and entertaining posts, you will have a successful blog because your readers will recognize your blog as an interesting place to visit. They will become your loyal readers and will be likely to recommend your blog to their friends.

As a blogger, you should be able to entertain your readers while helping your readers solve their problem. Whatever the reason the readers come to your blog, you must provide them with interesting and helpful contents. Use your own unique writing style in every post you write.

2) Successful Blog Informs the Readers Effectively

Even though you are not a teacher by general definition of “teacher”, you are teaching when you are blogging. You are giving tips and guidance for your readers regarding what they should do in a specific situation. You are giving step by step tutorial regarding what your readers need to know. You are sharing what you know with your readers. Basically, you are teaching your readers through your blog.

A successful blog informs the readers effectively, which means you transmit the information to your readers in the most effective and interesting way. A good blog will make the readers want to know more and make them curious to find out more.

3) Successful Blog Is a Community for Like-Minded People

Yes, you read it right. Successful blog is a community for like-minded people. Any successful blogger will respond to the readers’ feedbacks. He will communicate with the readers and build a good relationship with them. If the readers want further information regarding your post, they will likely post a comment. A good blogger will gladly answer any questions or concerns asked by the readers.

Successful blog is an active discussion platform where the readers actively participate in the discussion. This is what makes a successful blog different from a dead blog.

4) Successful Blog Has Compelling Posts

The most important ability for a successful blogger is an ability to write quality and persuasive content. Compelling posts will win the heart of the readers and will likely move them to buy what you are offering. A successful blog has great headlines and contents. It is structured solely to entice the readers to read more. They are willingly spending their valuable time reading your blog posts because they found your posts worth their time. So, this is the last characteristic of successful blog: it is compelling.

5) Successful Blog Gives You Inspiration

No matter what is your niche, you have to be able to inspire your readers. Without giving them inspiration with your content, your blog won’t be able to stick in their head. Successful blogger has an ability to craft a blog post that will inspire as well as educate their readers.

When you are able to insert those 5 most important characteristics of a successful blog to your blog, you will transform your blog into one of the most successful blog on the internet.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

5 Most Important Characteristics of a Successful Blog [Guest Post]

The article, How to Beat Content Scrapers – And Avoid Google Panda Penalties – With Copyright Protection, deals with common issues like legal disclaimers, what you need to know about copyright laws, and also tells you how to register your content through the Electronic Copyright Office. Those interested in protecting their content this way can register a single piece of content (e.g. a blog post) or a collective work (e.g. all your blog posts).

There is no other article online that I know of that offers more valuable information, presented so straightforward as this. So I urge you to read Neal’s post, and take the necessary steps to protect your creative works.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Copyright Protection Advice for Online Writers

Where to research:

• You can start with the search engines and type in the keywords related to the topic you want to cover. Google will return the most relevant results, but you shouldn’t count only on those few pages of SEO optimized content that appear in the first results. Dig deeper.
• Then check out digg and see what makes people tick. Digg is a popular social media bookmarking network, powered mainly by young users that look for sensational. Even when you write about trees you shouldn’t ignore this market. The youth is the future after all, and your purpose is to educate, isn’t it?
• StumbleUpon is another great research channel. It has a search tool that functions the same as any search engine but delivers results that are truly relevant to your query. You’ll be surprised of the quality of the popular pages at StumbleUpon.
• Don’t forget to take a look at some popular video sharing sites like YouTube and Veoh to see what people like when it comes to videos related to your topic.
• Why didn’t put Twitter at the top of the list? Well, because I wrote this post a long time ago, when Twitter was in its infancy. So, since Twitter is so popular, do use it as a research tool.
• Last, but not least, do a Google blog search to find blogs related to your topic. Bookmark these blogs as they could serve as platforms to promote your product, but before you bookmark them, read carefully the entries and the readers’ comments. In many cases these comments are pretty relevant in regards to what people like and dislike and they also give a very good idea about what people want to know.
• And don’t forget to read other topic-related ebooks!

The research will help you choose your topic (a too general topic converts less) and identify your target audience too. Sure, you already had an idea about what your target audience is, but the research will enable you to know what this audience really wants.

next: which are the most profitable niches

Note: if you have the feeling that you read this article before, you are probably right. It used to be published at http://pamil-visions.blogspot.com/ – and since I decided to stop feeding Google with my content it is understandable (I hope) why the article has been relocated.

If you want to enjoy more in depth advice on “how to write ebooks advice” visit Lillie Ammann’s blog, for example: Is an E-Book a Real Book?

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Writing Ebooks – The Basics of Online Research

Founded on January 6, 2009, Everything PR is a webblog dedicated to reviewing and promoting public relations companies and services; corporate communications and marketing trends; as well as various social media aspects of the Web. The site will also review Web startups and the way they conduct their public relations campaigns. In addition to covering PR news, we also write PR and marketing editorials that analyze current online PR, marketing and communication trends.

The site is our first of many improvements that will expand Pamil Visions PR’s influence in the PR industry. Next we will re-launch www.pamil-visions.com with an improved corporate design, interactive features like live chat and rating/reviewing system, a comprehensive list of PR resources for professionals and novices alike and much more.

eWritings will remain a resource for those interested in different aspects of PR and SEO, and as usual it will also cover other aspects like body language and personal opinions of its author, Mihaela Lica (that’s me).

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Everything PR Hits the High and Low Spots of Public Relations Online

The guest author today is the talented Sue Bride of Blogging Sueblimely. I am sure most of eWritings’ readers already know her – after all we meet in the same “social networks.” For those of you who don’t know her, I strongly encourage you not to stop at this article, but to follow the links to her blog for more blogging knowledge. I think I am not mistaking when I compare this writer with Lorelle of WordPress. Although not even half as popular, Sue is as dedicated and her blogging is as rich in information.

When I report on new social networking applications I often get responses along the lines of “not another one” or “I can’t keep up with it all “. I understand what they mean but I cannot see the situation changing soon because our communication needs are not yet satisfied.

Our busy lifestyles, situations and locations often preclude much of the close real life contact that we used to enjoy and online networks can re-establish or keep this alive. Many join social networks to help them escape from reality too, have a time free of the stresses of the real world. Businesses are joining in to connect with markets that they can no longer reach using traditional methods alone. Bloggers participate as another tool to connect with other bloggers, readers and potential readers.

I have been following the progress of online communication for years. My own first tentative steps began with bulletin boards and chat programs that have long since disappeared. I discovered a world that took me out of the day to day routine of life as a stay at home mom of babies into one that offered me stimulating conversations; it widened my horizons and refuelled my interest in learning. The term web 2.0 had not yet been coined.

The number of computer users soared after this, technology advances offering increasingly advanced applications that could be used by all, rather than just the technologically savvy. What has not changed is the need for online communication. We now regularly maintain online contact with our real life friends and family, business contacts and colleagues as well as establishing contact with new people. Online life has become a part of real life for people of all ages and backgrounds.

Applications are trying to provide for the needs and desires of an increasingly diverse market. The popularity of Facebook shows how great the needs are. Has Facebook got it right? I think it is on the right track and has provided more for a wider range of people than anything else before it, but in its current form it cannot be all things to all people.

More applications are coming along in an effort to attract those who are not satisfied with what is already available, existing applications expand to add more features to maintain their current members. We are seeing more targeted, niche social networks based on interests, hobbies, occupation, family situation and location. As we progress into the era of the ‘semantic web’ I imagine that social media will more accurately match us with our interest areas. I hope this does not lead us to be more insular and cliquey: being able to discover new and different people and subjects is one of the beauties of the web.

As people join multiple social networking sites a new need has arisen: a way of consolidating our activities into a single application so that we can receive or send updates to our various profiles from one place. Services such as FriendFeed, Digsby, Twhirl and Secondbrain are providing some of this functionality already.

I see the stage coming when this sort of aggregation will be integrated more fully into a comprehensive social network or vice versa, cell phone and webcam functionality included. I am sure some of the major players would love to have access to our complete combined profiles, be able to monitor activities and feed us with targeted ads.

I suspect we will be saying “oh no not another one” for a long time to come, as our hunger to communicate will not be satisfied until such “FeedMyFaceSpace” applications become available and we are happy to settle for one nook on the net to call home.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Oh No! Not Another Social Networking Site

You climb the highest mountain and gaze around you. It’s an achievement and everyone you know is mesmerized by your courage, devotion and willingness to succeed. You are above the rest. Top of the world. Happy. You did it.

You like it there. There is no one like you. You have all the reasons in the world to be proud and you look around to see who else admires the uncrowned king or queen. Is there anyone else so high, so popular, so awesome?

Guess what: veiled by the clouds, amidst other mountain-tops, as happy in their solitude and as unaware, there are so many others… just like you. Just like you. Blind. The ones who forgot all about their roots because the wind has carried them so high.

They are the ones who, just like you, cannot see more, not because they necessarily climbed to the top of the world, but because… the fog is there. Foggy glory: an illusion. Just like yours.

When you are there you mess up because you forget. You tend to forget even the people who helped you climb so fast and so far; and you are too blind to see the real stars – cloudy days shade the sun. Another day passes by…

Act one was when we met, I loved you at first glance
You read your line so cleverly and never missed a cue
Then came act two, you seemed to change and you acted strange
And why I’ll never know

A king asked that long before you, blogging queen, blogging king. There was someone else there, just like you. When will you wake up? When will you look back on your past, see your roots and understand: the higher you climb, the harder you fall. Without the people around you have no name. There is no glory without those smaller than you. There is no triumph. A king without a kingdom is a pauper in any man’s word. So stop dreaming.

Be Ivy

What do I want to say, in the end, with this entry? That if you are one of those who forgot their roots, you will not even bother to read. But if you are one of those who still understand what blogging is all about… you will read, comment, share. Just like me. You are here: this is the proof that climbing hasn’t cut off your roots. You are ivy spreading your roots everywhere. Not poison ivy. Ivy.

Let me ask you a simple question: how high does one need to climb to suddenly become too important? I noticed the phenomena in many blogs, even companies that just start their journey. Once they get more attention than anyone expected, they start acting like primadonas. What they forget in the journey is that to be a primadona you need the looks, the voice, the talent, the charisma but most importantly you need the public to see all those great gifts.

There is no glory without an audience. There is no star without the sky to shine on and obviously there is no way to become “the brightest” star without the stars to be compared with. When you sing alone in the shower what is there to make you shine?

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

The Higher You Climb, the Less That You Know

In the mad race for traffic and hits, how many online entrepreneurs stop to wonder about quality?

It’s my personal conviction that too many are mesmerized by their high stats displayed by the web analytics software employed for traffic analysis. What most of these webtrepreneurs fail to understand is that numbers are not relevant for the sales power of a site. They are not relevant for popularity either, and they are far from being relevant when it comes to quality.

What Is Social Network Automation?

I too am a user of StumbleUpon, digg, sphin, del.icio.us, mag.nolia, mixx, etc… Sure I am happy to see thousands of page views each day, but at the end of the traffic flood, the ones who actually take the time to read my stories are still my friends, my community – the people who already know me, trust me, respect me. These people are also the ones who stumble or support my entries anyway. Social networking is about sharing knowledge, experience, and fun. What is social networking automation about anyway?

I have only one definition: social network automation is spam.

Social network automation tools submit a link not to one or two social sites, but to twenty, thirty, sometimes more than sixty. Out of these sites not even half are relevant for the topic of the story. The apparent SEO advantage (links) that comes as a result of automation means nothing in the long run. The search engines are smart enough to identify the quality of a link.

Let’s take digg for example: a story with two-three votes will not bring the same SEO value as a story with 100 votes. As a matter of fact it will bring no value unless it gets indexed high in the search engines. But even then the real winner is digg – digg will get more clicks on that page. In the best case you’ll get half of the users who land on that particular digg page actually clicking on your link to read your story. Do I make any sense?

Is Social Network Automation Ethical?

We often question ethics in blogging. How many times do we question ethics in promoting our work?

There is nothing wrong with asking our friends from the social networks to “stumble” or “digg” a story if they like it. What is wrong is to submit these stories to social networks where we are not even active using some tools that were developed especially for this purpose. In theory these tools simplify our work, save time and help generate incoming links and traffic.

But isn’t employing such tools defying all that social networking stands for?

With every use of an automation tool we mock the very ideals that are the basis of social networking. The social networking automation tools simply throw links in front of the users. In many cases these links are not even relevant for the members of the network, and sometimes they are not properly tagged or categorized. This leads to poor user experience within the network and the frustration of the users will eventually lead to negative votes on the story submitted with automation tools. Instead of ripping off the benefits of social media exposure the links thus submitted will be banned from the network or – in the ideal scenario – buried under other entries, more relevant and submitted by dedicated social network users who actively contribute in the community.

So my advice is to avoid any social automation tools and to start focusing on quality and building a community instead.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Social Network Automation and Why You Don’t Want to Be Part of It

No, you are not drunk, although as things go on you wish you were. You didn’t take any hallucinogenic substances either. You are perhaps too demanding, because you care about your time, but this doesn’t change the sad truth that the blog in question has something rotten going on. The only explanation I could come up with is the “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”

There is a reason for you to keep on reading that blog: some of the authors are still delivering the kind of quality you expect.

But even there you notice a strange phenomenon. I’ll call it patting. Comments patting, to be more specific. This is when the authors of the same blog comment on each other’s entries and engage in internal debates to make the comments box look busy. In my dictionary that translates:

“Look, I wrote another piece of bad literature. But if you pat my shoulder and you make it look interesting, I’ll return you the favor my dear colleague when you screw up.”

Then you assist to the whole process of patting, teasing, taunting, scratching each other’s back. Full comment madness.

You stay in front of your monitor reading the crap and you wonder why not surf away to never return to that URL? Yet there’s something keeping you there like a strange evil force. You want to see what comes next, when do they stop, when do they finally realize their little game is ridiculous and fruitless.

But wait that’s not all! One of the authors even asks her husband to contribute. And imagine this: the lovely pair, sitting side by side comment crazy, typing and sweating their way into spicing up the comments box, each playing a role. It all appears as if two complete strangers (author and reader) debate over a topic of maximum interest. They argue. They agree. She writes a bad article. A real commentator this time wonders what went wrong. That blog used to be good. The husband comes to rescue the damsel in distress. You watch in shock and even see the order of the comments changing at refresh. Someone is covering some tracks here. You know.

It’s entertaining. It’s like seeing Jekyll and Hyde for the first time. A good blog gone bad because the editor just lost it. Because the editor doesn’t care anymore. There are other priorities in life, aren’t there?

Then it hits me! I know what happens with the blog. It is not the editor. It is strategy. The blog lost its quality, remember? Good authors left it for better gigs. So how to keep at least some readers? Entertain them!

Now I laugh. I remember one of Lorelle’s evil entries and I cannot help but quoting one of her “advices” here:

When I’ve published something on my blog, I log out and then leave comments pretending I’m someone else. I say great things about what I’ve wrote – er, the blogger wrote – and stir things up if the post is really boring. You know, like add some jazz.

You know, you can’t write like awesome every time, so it’s important that you get the comments going so people will have at least other comments to talk to. Besides, it like breaks the ice, you know. These dumb twits who read blogs, they need some butt kicking to leave a comment, don’t they?

Sadly Lorelle’s “evil advice” (which was pure parody at the address of the bloggers who really engage in such practices) is the cruel reality that hit the blog we were talking about.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The idea of better blogging is not new – we start blogging and always try to improve our skills. Some for traffic, some for more readers, some for gaining more credibility in their own businesses. There are as many reasons as blogs – not always fully stated by their owners, at times not even acknowledged. But the truth is that blogging doesn’t just happen. There is no such a thing as blogging for no reason. And when things happen for a reason it is up to us to make the best out of them.

Sue at Sueblimely tagged me to share my thoughts on a better blogging meme. Her idea is to spread this meme on as many blogs as possible to serve as an inspiration and model for novices to follow.

Actually, Sueblimely put up together a few rules to follow in response to this meme, and as the meme etiquette requires, I’ll copy and paste them here, then follow up with my answers and my own tags.

<— Please start copying here—>

The Blogging Better Meme by Sueblimely

The idea of this meme is to:

1. Help us stop and think about how we could become better bloggers and what we need to do to achieve this.
2. Share our blogging knowledge and experience.

Please answer these questions in relation to your blogging (in as little or as much detail as you wish):-

1. The most important thing I have learned over the last year.
2. What I would like to achieve within the next year.
3. What I wish to learn more about.
4. How could I be more productive?
5. One new thing I plan to try.
6. The blogging tip{s) I have found the most useful
7. The 4 (or more) people I am passing this on to. (please include someone quite new to blogging if you can – to help them along by introducing them to your own readers and giving them some backlinks).

Here are my answers. You can use this to give yourself ideas, approach the meme in a completely different way and add or change the questions to suit what you would like to know. You can even choose not to take part at all if you are not keen on memes.

<— End copying —>

Better blogging is about choices and ethics pretty much as it is about style, inspiration, dedication and communicating. Blogging is also about relationships: with the readers, with the other bloggers, with the employers and the family. And blogging is pretty much about understanding responsibility.

As Sue underlines in her original entry a blog is not a personal diary. Once you go online, you go public. Everything you write and publish is there to stay. Think of a boomerang effect: words you just throw can and will come back to you. So it is pretty important to assume responsibility for what you do and say online. I once wrote an entry for my former employing company Red Dog. It was called “Naked in a Public Garden” and it dealt precisely to assuming responsibility for what we do online. I quote from that article three golden rules you should include in your blogging routine if you want to stay on the “better blogging” path:

• never publish something (not even under password protected login) that you wouldn’t want your children/mother to see;
• never publish information about your employer, colleagues, job;
• never publish a story without checking it twice, or thrice if necessary – just make sure you don’t pervert the truth;

Now to answer the particular questions of the meme:

1. The most important thing I’ve learned over the past year is that there are better chances of getting good business contacts and achieving success when we work together instead of competing against each other. Although I cannot call myself a writer (as English is not my native tongue and obviously I have enough grammar errors) writing is what I do. The public relations consultant communicates mainly with written materials: press releases, articles and reports. I work with native writers and bloggers to deliver good quality materials to my clients. I win by learning from the people I work with and I believe they win by working with me too.
2. The next year is the year of many changes. There’s a lot happening in my life already, but from a blogging perspective, I have a few important projects to bring to fruition. An SEO book is planned for the end of January, then I will try to boost up the popularity for eWritings and start in cooperation with Alina Popescu a blog about Romania.
3. I wish to learn more about social media. There are some channels I either don’t use or don’t want to use, partially because of some misconceptions (Twitter for example) – and I will explore them more in 2008.
4. Productivity will be achieved through better planning and a bolder approach to doing business. I need to organize my stuff effectively – I already have to do more than I can and delegating tasks to different online collaborators seems to be the next logical thing to do.
5. A new thing I plan to try… well, there are no “new” plans there. There are, however, a few waiting in the queue.
6. The blogging tips I find useful come from many different blogs, but one in particular has something of real value almost every day: Liz’s Successful Blog.
7. This particular meme is worth spreading around, so here are the people I think that could really contribute to the topic: Yvonne, Laura, Lillie and for the newbie John Raul – a young blogger from Malaysia who shows a lot of potential.

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Tips for Better Blogging – The Sueblimely Meme