'Blogging While Black': New Book Discusses One Journalist’s Rise to National Prominence During the Historic 2008 Presidential Election

We had some heady times in my early days as a blogger!  The afrosphere was buzzing with online activism that reached its heights with the Jena Six protest march.  One of the leading Black bloggers of that era was a young brother named Shawn Williams.  

As such, this blog is pleased to inform all villagers that social media and hyper-local news pioneer Shawn Williams released his first book, Blogging While Black, which chronicles the pivotal role his blog played during the historic 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, as well as during the brief but effective online civil rights movement. Williams is publisher of DallasSouthBlog.org, a frequent columnist for the Dallas Morning News and formerly contributed to WFAA Channel 8’s Inside Texas Politics.

“The meteoric rise in popularity of then-Senator Obama created an avenue for African Americans to stand up and speak out about their community and their country,” said Williams. “Regretfully, when some people saw Black bloggers weigh-in on politics, the message was misunderstood by some and perceived as antagonistic by others,” Williams said. “Blogging consistent messages allowed us the opportunity to articulate an intelligent point of view that didn’t appear vitriolic, and allowed for understanding which opened doors for effective communication.” 

Beginning with the plight of a teenager in Paris,Texas, and ending with the election of President Barack Obama, Blogging While Black tells the story of how Williams, and other online advocates, changed America for the better. The book also looks at “breakthrough bloggers” who have transferred their online stardom into offline success.

Blogging While Black is a tool created for aspiring writers, bloggers and journalists who want to make inroads through the media and make a difference in the community as well. At the end of each chapter, Blogging While Black provides tips for anyone who aspires to use social media tools to make their own mark online, including: how to launch a blog in five minutes; how to become a big fish in a small media pond; how to leverage your personal networks; and how to use your phone as a news gathering tool.

This would make a great gift for any bloggers in your sphere of influence!

Gift Suggestion: RSS Feed Subscriptions

Our economy is terrible! Therefore, most villagers are looking for less expensive ways to share gifts with our favorite bloggers. I thought that I would help you out with one really great idea:


Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog!

Some villagers may be asking, 'What the heck is RSS?'. My hope is that the rest of y'all already know the value in being a RSS feed subscriber. After all, you don't want to go into the new year missing any of our blog posts just because you weren't able to personally get online to visit. The front page of this blog only holds about 7-9 posts ... so some of them only stay on the main page for a few days.

Subscribe to my feed and you never need to miss out in the future.

I tried to make it easy with the widget up at the top of the sidebar over on the right. I hope that this is a helpful decision for your holiday gift-giving efforts. After all, a RSS feed subscription is the gift that keeps on giving!

Is Your Digital Tattoo Attracting or Repulsing Customers?

Tonya R. Taylor

It’s a fact, love them or hate them tattoos are popular and (almost) permanent. The tattoo design choice, or body art, says something about you; well actually a lot about you. It may convey your mood at a particular moment in time, it may have a deep personal meaning, you may like the artwork or some may think they're just stylish.

Even though tattoos have become incredibly mainstream the kind I am talking about has nothing to do with body art. This type of tattoo is about your business or career; yes even if you have a small business, be a college student or work in corporate America. Let me ask you a simple question, what does your digital tattoo say about your business?

Before you can answer that, I need to explain exactly what a Digital Tattoo is.

Just like a regular tattoo, your digital reputation is an expression of yourself and your business. Over time it is shaped by you and added to by others which include friends, family and your business visibility online and in the media.

Your digital tattoo is what a potential customer, recruiter, corporate executive, or anybody else finds online about your business. It’s the information people see when they search the internet for your name or your business name.

What images will they find of you? – an old photo from college or high school, your company logo, a cartoon character where your picture should be or your favorite sports team instead of a current photo?

What information will they find on your website or blog? – a new video, static information that has never been changed or updated since December or your latest blog post?

What images will they find on social media? - are you presenting at a conference, you with your family, you participating at a networking event or hanging out with friends?  (Are you even using social media to help shape your digital tattoo?)

What information will they find in the media? – your published article(s), a press release, a story written about you or your business, or nothing at all?

Why is your digital tattoo important? - Ask any successful salesperson or flourishing marketer, they will tell you this...“People buy from people they know, they like and they trust”.

Your digital tattoo will help create the magic to make this happen.

Copyright © 2011 Rising Star Ideas, LLC. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tonya R. Taylor, Your Savvy Online Business Builder, is dedicated to helping you learn how to use the internet to build a bigger more profitable business so you can spend more and make less. Her clients learn savvy ways to use their website to take their online presence to the next level fast. To get your FREE Savvy Online Business Building Starter Kit and receive weekly online marketing tips, tools and resources visit www.SavvyBizBuilder.com.

What The Heck is RSS?

And why should I care?

Good questions. First, here's why you should care.

Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control over the situation.

You don't have to reveal your email address. If you want to stop receiving content, you don't have to request to be taken off the list.

One click, and poof the subscription is gone.

Plus, since there's no email address involved, there's no way a publisher can sell, rent or give away the means to contact you.

That's right no more spam, viruses, phishing, or identity theft. And best of all, no reason to put yourself at the mercy of the publisher's intentions.

You won't need to suffer through the legalese in the privacy policy (if there is one) looking for loopholes that will send you deeper into inbox hell. No more setting up dummy GMail accounts "just in case."

Again, if you don't like the content, you can make it disappear as fast as you can change a TV channel. With just one click.

Pretty cool, huh?

That is cool! Umm What the heck is RSS?

Alright! Now we're ready to get to that part.

RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest.

You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that's the essence of an RSS feed ... you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

If you actually want to know how RSS works, click here.

What the heck is a feed reader?

You may already be using a form of feed reader, and not even realize it. If you use personalized home page services like My Yahoo or My MSN, you've got RSS capabilities built in. That's how syndicated content like news, weather and stock quotes appears on your personal page. You can also add content from any blog or other site that uses RSS to provide updates.

Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed reading only. One of the most popular web-based feed readers at this point is Bloglines, and it's also free and easy to get started with.

If you use the Firefox browser, you can also receive RSS feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks function. The next version of Internet Explorer will add this feature as well.

Finally, there are desktop-based feed readers. These function somewhat like an email program for feeds. Examples include Newsgator and Feed Demon.

If it sounds complicated, it s really not. And things will get even easier when the next version of Outlook integrates feed-reading capabilities. So, you'll have the same convenience that email subscriptions offered in the old days, without any of the terrible consequences of giving out your email address to potentially unscrupulous characters.

Sounds good. So how do I subscribe to a Feed?

First of all, look for the subscription or feed options (some bloggers make this difficult for some odd reason). You might see a variety of buttons (amusingly called chicklets).

If the site you want to subscribe to uses FeedBurner to aid in the subscription process (like Electronic Village and many other popular sites), you'll likely see the standard RSS icon, which takes you to a page that will give you an array of the most popular feed readers so you can select yours, and you'll go from there. This is the new standard RSS icon:



Sometimes there will be a chicklet for your particular reader right on the blog that will take you to the appropriate subscription page. You may see these (among others):







Finally, you may also see little orange buttons that say XML or RSS. Often these chicklets will take you to a page that looks like code gibberish. In this case, you simply cut and paste the page URL from your browser window and manually paste it into your feed reader subscription function.

Hopefully this last method will soon disappear, never to be seen again.

In summary: RSS solves BIG problems.

So there you have it RSS is being adopted at a phenomenal rate, because it's a good thing for everyone.

The benefit to readers is obvious. And it's good for publishers too, because we want to make sure that people feel comfortable subscribing, and that our message is not nuked by an overzealous spam filter.

If there's anything here that is confusing, or you have a question, please contact me and I'll be happy to help!

Thanks to Copyblogger for a helping hand with this tutorial.

30 Day Challenge: Day 2, Market Research

I continued my journey through the 30 Day Challenge. Whether you’re an Internet newbie or a bricks and mortar business owner looking to expand your web presence, these 30 days should provide rock-solid techniques for building a real, live sustainable business online.

The focus of Day 2 is market research. Choosing a market and selecting the best keywords to reach it are where the majority of mistakes are made when getting a new online business off the ground. I had a rough time with this lesson because I don't have a tightly defined niche market. However, I did make it through the full lesson. I had to redo one section four times before I was able to get it right.

We only saw Ed Dale briefly during today's lesson. He introduced an amazing tool that gives us keyword data to help accurately assess our potential niches and make our workload much lighter.

There are five videos in Lesson 2:

1. UNLEASHING MARKET SAMURAI - Ed introduces the magic of Market Samurai and walks us through how to download and install the software. It is a straightforward downloading process. 30DC participants receive a complimentary 40-day trial of the complete Market Samurai software.


2. KEYWORD RESEARCH - Guru Bob, head of The Lab, introduces the major concepts of keyword research. He also lays out what sort of numbers we should be looking for when you begin considering niches. At this stage of the game, he wants us to find micro-niches (keywords with less than 30,000 searches per day). He does a good job of defining terms in this section. I know the difference between a 'market' and a 'niche'. I also know that successful online marketing at my level requires me to identify a 'micro-niche'. This section focused on the theory of keyword research. In the next section, we actually do a case-study and apply it to our personal online business.


3. KEYWORD RESEARCH CASE STUDY - Guru Bob shows us Market Samurai in action, drilling down in the market "Guitars." It sounds innocent enough. I spent a great deal of time in this section because my preferred markets ('African Americans' or 'Information Technology') didn't yield me viable 'micro-niche' markets. Anyhow, I finally found two micro-niche keywords that I plan to carry forward into tomorrow's lesson.


4. MANUAL KEYWORD RESEARCH - Dan Raine steps us through how to do "manual" market research if Market Samurai doesn't work on your computer. I didn't complete this one. I'm counting on Market Samurai to cut away the weeds for me!


5. MARKET SAMURAI TUTORIAL - Ed shows you where to find in-depth Market Samurai tutorials and how to get support if you need additional help. This video was about 2-3 minutes in length.

The videos together run about 60 minutes, however, it took me much longer because I kept having to repeat that 3rd video. Anyhow, my advice to anyone who is just starting is to spend adequate time on the Day 1 lesson. Make sure you have a clear idea of the 5-10 ideas you want to use for this 30DC. I didn't have that clear in my mind ... and it cost me today.

30 Day Challenge: Day 1, A Magnificant Symphony

Pastor Cedric told me about the Thirty Day Challenge a few months ago. The Thirty Day Challenge is about making your first $10 online. I've decided to participate for a full 30 days to learn how to grow my own Internet business and generate income online without spending a dime. That's right, this is going to cost zip, diddly, nothing, nada, ziltch. The entire training program is free ... other than the investment of my time. No credit card required.

I will report back to you on my progress over the course of the 30 days.

The host of the program is Ed Dale. Ed uses the first lesson to demystify the four elements critical to the success of every online business, reviewing some essential tools and showing ways to get great ideas for our new business.

There are three videos that run for about 30 minutes in Lesson 1:

1. SYMPHONY OF FOUR PARTS - Ed covers the core building blocks common to every Internet business. I learned in this lesson that the market research should occur before the identification of a product. This is the opposite of what I've seen occur for most business owners. Most of us have a product or service in mind ... then (MAYBE) we do market research. Ed gave a compelling reason for flipping the script if we want to build a successful online business.


2. TOOLS OF THE TRADE - Ed gives a quick run down of the tools of the trade and suggests which to install first. The section about 'tools of the trade' was also full of new information for me. I knew about some of the tools like Twitter, Google Reader and YouTube. However, I wasn't using tools like StumbleUpon, Twhirl or FriendFeed until taking this lesson. Twhirl is especially helpful because I have a Twitter account for my personal and professional use. Twhirl allows me to handle them both with a single logon.


3. THE GETTING OF IDEAS - Ed shares his favorite method for getting new site ideas, and a cool way to have news about them delivered straight to our email box or newsreader. The lesson ends with a homework assignment to identify 5-10 marketable ideas. My plan right now is to focus on gaining online traction for my current offline consulting business. I guess I will find out in future lessons whether that is acceptable or not.

I would be interested in feedback from any villager that completed the 30 Day Challenge. Do you recommend it for others?

30 Day Challenge: Day 5, Getting Some Content

My journey into the 30 Day Challenge continues. I used the first four days to identify my keyword phrase, affiliate product, and initial ad copy.

The focus of today's lesson was on finding content. Ed Dale makes the point that content is the engine that drives the Internet. People go online to find information about a particular topic or to be entertained. Content is what they seek ... and content is what the search engines use to find our site when we are in position to provide relevant, unique information to our site visitors.

Anyhow, we learn how to create content (300-500 word mini-articles) without having to be writing superstars.

There are two videos (30 minutes) in Lesson 5:

1. FINDING ARTICLE CONTENT - GuruBob shows us how to use the Find Content module of Market Samurai to find content relevant to our target keyword. This is a very good tool that provides analysis on the strength of that content for our purposes. For example, we can see when the article was written, how many back links to it, what the Page Rank is for the article's spot in the Internet and how many times are keyword phrase is embedded in the article. This is a worthy feature of Market Samurai and gives me another reason to consider purchasing the upgrade at the end of the 40-day trial period.


2. MAKE YOUR OWN CONTENT - In this video, Ed uses Google Reader to show us other ways to collect news relevant to our target keyword and turn it into content that is uniquely ours. Ed also explains the Attribution Method for creating content fast.

Our homework for today is to create 5-10 mini-articles based on our keyword phrase. I haven't completed the homework as I type this blog post ... but, I plan to get it done before the end of the day! Wish me luck...

Clutch Magazine Offers Summer Blog Academy

I'm pleased to see more and more Black bloggers taking their craft seriously. Dede Sutton, the sister who runs Clutch Magazine (BBR #17), plans to partner with with Black Web 2.0 (BBR #237 and others to create a summer series that helps her readers learn how to succeed online. The seminar will go over just about every element someone should know when entering the online game. Also, it will hip them to the most up to date trends in social media.
Some of the topics to be discussed in the Summer Blog Academy include:

• How to make money from your blog or website.
• Tactics to increase traffic.
• Learn about social media/marketing in general.
• Learn how to set up, design and maintain your site.

It should be an interesting experience. I plan to participate as a prelude to attending the Blogging While Brown Conference in Atlanta on July 18-20.

How To Market Your Blog in 2008

There are over 600 Black blogs included in the Black Blog Rankings this month. We share the list of the Top 10 Black Blogs on the 1st day of each month. However, there are many blogs with great content that are not being widely recognized. They aren't getting comments ... they don't have high traffic rankings ... and their pagerank is low.

I read an article written last year by Tony Hung that I found quite inspiring. It helped me a lot, so I thought I'd share its main points here with you. Below you'll find tips from Tony with a few of my own comments attatched. I hope it will help you improve your blog's rankings and blogosphere influence in 2008.

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Persistence: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. You must write well and write consistently. You can never give up! In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.


Become an expert on something: It's my view that if you read one book per week on a given subject ... you will be a world-class expert on that subject within a year. Most people don't read regularly. You can develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will make you an expert. Bloggers will seek out your expertise, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted.


Design is more important than you think: You can only make a first impression once — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, you need to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary. I redesigned my blog using the services of someone who's work I kept seeing as I surfed the Internet. Do what you have to do to ensure that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams "yes, I am worthy of your attention!".


Get Your SEO On: SEO = Search Engine Optimization — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.


Publish full feeds: Publishing full feeds can increase your traffic. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.


Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.


Break important stories: If you have an interest in an area, it is possible to break important stories as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.


Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.


Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and "publish it". My fledgling efforts at researching and publishing the Black Blog Rankings is an example.


Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)


Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.


Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: - When you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend (we call them villagers) and contact.


Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain ... even the big bloggers ... and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.


MyBlogLog My traffic on this blog tripled last year when I subscribed to MyBlogLog — I encourage you to know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has exploded all over the blogosphere. MyBlogLog offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can "add" friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages.


Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.


Join blog network: Between Afrosphere Bloggers Association, The AfroSpear and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one.


Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog. I recently created a forum for Black IT professionals.


Participate on larger blogs in comments: By participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site ("hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … "). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.


Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of "blog network" (see #16), that syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your crew that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top 100 publishers only.


Participate in Wordless Wednesday meme: They publish links to all of the participants.


Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.


Submit to Google sitemaps: Google will be able to find you so much easier when you use Google sitemaps. As you gain more Google juice, you'll get more traffic, resulting in higher rankings faster.


Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.


Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.


Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news.


Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.


Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.


Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com


Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of "networking" (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more "ads" into their MyBlogLog network, more "ads" into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.


Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.


Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.


Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional "doors" … because now that you’re getting paid ... you’re a "pro-blogger"


Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. A great opportunity is coming up later this year at the Blogging While Brown conference!


Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, CollectiveX, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.


Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.


Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. You can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead?


Join Helium: Helium actively looks for people to head new categories of content. Think a paid "about.com" — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.


Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a "signature" is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent "gaming", but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.


Join LinkedIn Network: More of a professional network that is an important part of any blogger's toolkit. Here is my Linkedin Profile.


Create a Squidoo Page Lens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.


Use MySpace Marketing: The idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic. Here is my profile on MySpace.


Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously.

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Do you have other marketing ideas for bloggers that aren't included in this list? Villagers, I'm going to redouble my efforts in 2008 to implement many of these 42 ideas in the coming days and weeks. How about you?