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| TwitVid.io Adds Media Context to your Twitter Stream May 27, 2009 at 12:37 pm |
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TwitVid.io is the latest site to launch a tool that adds media context to your Twitter stream. What TwitVid.io does is allow you to upload a video and share the link through Twitter. Similar to its photo-centric counterparts such as TwitPic, the Fliggo-powered TwitVid.eo works by uploading video content directly from your computer and enabling you to share your uploaded content via links spread through Twitter. As a blogger, there are two different ways in which you can take advantage of a site such as TwitVid.eo: add another layer of media to your text-based tweets, and build your brand by driving content to more rich, video content. If you’re looking to shake things up on your typically textual Twitter updates, sharing links that lead to photos and videos are great ways to go. Since Twitter itself doesn’t offer direct media uploads, we have to rely on third party sites which are integrated with Twitter’s platform in order to incorporate multimedia content. Why is this beneficial for you? It adds more interesting content to your Twitter stream, and makes you look more involved in the social media scene. As a blogger, it’s important that you share content to other sites you find interesting, as well as semi-personal information about yourself to appear less spammy. The more personable you are, the less likely readers are to think you’re only using Twitter to sell a brand, product or service. Even if you are using Twitter for one of these purposes, engaging users within a community such as Twitter means you’ll have to attempt to be genuine. Personal video content is one way in which to do this. While the genuine and personal touch can be rather necessary for Twitter branding, you can also use Twitter updates as easy ways to share links and drive traffic to sites where you can further elaborate on your brand, service or product. Upload a video demo, a welcome greeting or an interview you’ve done for your blog, and share it through TwitVid.io. This can be used for direct messages, your public Twitter stream, and replies to other Twitter users. Create a repository of video content that you’d like to reserve specifically for Twitter use, and take advantage of it for promoting your own brand. There’s not yet any direct mobile integration for TwitVid.io, though emailing in video content from your phone to TwitVid.io does offer some on-the-go capabilities. And unlike similar services such as 12seconds, TwitVid.io is pretty reliant on the Twitter service itself. In this regard, mobile applications would vastly help TwitVid.io’s current feature set, and make video-blogging via Twitter that much easier for users on the go. Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately. |
| Serving post ratings in your blog May 27, 2009 at 10:00 am |
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Certain uses for WordPress, such as a showcase or gallery site might call for a user rating system. You may also want to implement one in your blog just to see how you improve over time and how it affects your user’s experience. A popular plugin for serving up star ratings to your visitors is WP-Post Ratings. Its easy to display the rating form with a function, and you can customize the rating images in a variety of colours and styles. Also, WP-Ratings allows you to filter the ratings by different groups like by author, category, month, or year. This would typically be the first plugin you would find searching through WP.org for any sort of rating system, but dig a little deeper and you might unearth some of these useful gems. Vote the post - This is a simple plugin that doesn’t nag at you with a lot of options. It offers a simple, user-friendly rating system with votes like "Below Average", "Needs Work" ,"Average", "Very Good" and "Excellent". Post Star Rating - This plugin installs quick and easy. It shows the highest rated posted for the month. It also lists the most popular posts at the moment and moves them up and down the list in realtime. Star Rating for Reviews - Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately. |
| 6 Tips to Avoid Blog Abandonment May 26, 2009 at 6:19 pm |
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 A recent survey by Technorati found that, of the 133 million blogs they had tracked since 2002, only 7.5 million had been updated within the past four months and, of those, only 1.5 million had been updated within the past 7 days. This means that, of all the blogs Technorati has tracked, only 5.6% are active, even within the last four months, and only 1.1% are active within the past week. In short, the vast majority of blogs are abandoned. Blog abandonment can happen for many reasons. Some people have shifts in their personal life that prevent them from finding the time (why I had to abandon my personal blog), others lose interest in their topic, others suffer some form of catastrophic failure while some just move on to something else. However, if you want your blog to be around for a few years to come, here are some suggestions to make sure you won’t abandon your blog once the going gets rough. 6. Get Paid Hosting Though there are many wonderful blogs that are hosted on free services such as WordPress.com and Blogspot and many that have been around for a long time, it is still much easier to walk away from something you haven’t invested in. If you are serious about blogging, you should look at getting your own domain and your own paid Web host. It only costs a few dollars per month for most bloggers and not only adds a great deal of professionalism to your site, but helps you stay focused. Besides, when you have your own domain, you can make the site more personal to you, which makes you both more personally and financially invested in your site. 5. Blog in Private Before starting a new blog, especially if you intend to make it a business of some variety, try blogging in private for a while. This has two functions: - Ensures Passion: It ensures that you have enough passion in your topic to survive the first few months, when traffic is likely to be almost non-existant.
- Lays the Groundwork: This also works to have a stockpile of articles ready and live when your site goes online. This gives the search engines something to go through and new readers reason to stick around.
How many posts you you want before you go live will depend on your planned blogging. Typically though, you’ll want at least a month’s worth of posts live, more if you are posting infrequently. Just make sure you have enough to ensure your site looks “open” when you actually let the rest of the world in. 4. Blog on a Schedule Here’s a tip that every blogger should know, put your posts up on a schedule. It doesn’t matter if your posts are daily, weekly or something in between, having your posts go up in a timely manner makes it easier for your readers to follow along and for you to keep writing. It becomes a part of your routine. How often should you write? At least weekly is best, but one of the best solutions is to figure out how many posts you can do per day/week and then schedule to do only half that. This allots you time for email, research, redesigns and other blog-related projects. If you find you can write more posts, you can speed up the schedule later. It is much easier to add more posts per week than to scale back. 3. Forward Post When Possible Most people have to be in a mood to write. As such, it’s a good idea to work with those moods. When you feel like writing, write a lot and forward post it to your site. Not only does this help you make the most of your inspiration, but it also ensures your site will be active even if you don’t want or can’t write. This helps you avoid missing a post, even when a more serious personal need arises, and it makes it easier to get back into writing for your site when you return. Many find that, once their schedule has been thrown off, it is very difficult to get back on it. 2. Read Up on Your Topic Writer’s block is the enemy of every writer on a deadline and doubly so for every blogger. Staying on top of your area of interest will help you keep writer’s block to a minimum by feeding you a stream of new ideas. Subscribe to blogs on a similar subject, subscribe to Technorati Watchlists, Google Blog Search feeds and even Twitter search feeds for your relevant keywords. Read what others are saying and then respond. This isn’t to say that you should always respond or echo what others are saying, but being part of the conversation means listening. Not only can find news to report on and conversations to join in on, but you can often get great ideas for truly revolutionary stories. 1. Take a Break For many, burnout is the enemy of blogging. If you feel yourself getting too stressed out about it, take a break from it for a while. If you forward post your articles, your readers may not even know the difference. Take a weekend away to clear your mind, being sure to leave your laptop behind, and step away from the Web. You have to make sure that blogging is in balance with the rest of your life. If you spend too much time blogging or doing blogging-related activities, you’re going to have to quit to preserve your sanity. Treat yourself well and don’t let your blog overrun your life. That may be the most important tip to keeping your blog around for the long haul. Bottom Line Even if you follow all of these tips, the odds are still stacked against you and your blog. Most blogs close within a few months of opening, Still, if you take these suggestions, you can at least improve your chances of having a long-running blog and enjoying the audience, personal satisfaction and, possibly, money that comes with it. Make no mistake, blogging is a lot of work, but if you enjoy it and you make it a routine part of your life, it doesn’t have to feel like a job. Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately. | | |
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| The End of Subject/Verb Agreement: The Final Rules May 26, 2009 at 3:17 pm |
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Today we’re going to finish up our series in Subject/Verb agreement. Aren’t you glad? Did anyone remember how many rules there were between subject and verb agreement or had you forgotten like me? Many of our words in the English language are singular nouns but they have a plural form. Words like civics, gymnastics, mathematics, mumps, and social studies are singular because they refer to a single thing even though the spelling suggests they are plural by having an -s on the end. When we have words like this we should use a singular verb for subjects that seem plural in form but are actually singular in meaning. Measles is a very contagious disease. The evening news is on every night at 10:00. There are also other groups of words that are plural as their form suggests and another group of words that can be singular or plural. Plural: data, eyeglasses, media, scissors, slacks, barracks, pants. Singular/Plural: acoustics, headquarters, ethics, politics. My eyeglasses were found in the office. The headquarters for the CIA is located in Washington. (This is singular because it represents an administrative office or center.) The headquarters were located outside of town. (This is plural because it represents a group of buildings.) If you’re referring to a pair of something and use the word “pair” in the sentence, the verb is singular and has to agree with the singular noun pair. The scissors are missing. (Plural) That pair of scissors is missing. (Singular) Doesn’t it make sense to use don’t? These words are contractions and to check them for agreement with the subject, you should read or say them as the two original words used to make the contraction. (Does not, do not) Some contractions are singular and some are plural. Singular: Doesn’t, hasn’t, isn’t, wasn’t. Plural: Don’t, haven’t, aren’t, weren’t. The verb part of the contraction has to agree in number with the subject. This cold room doesn’t bother me. (Does not) These rules don’t make sense. (Do not) That boy doesn’t want to play. (Does not) Those boys don’t play fair. (Do not) Sometimes a subject has a linking verb. Linking verbs are commonly the forms of be: be, is, am, are, was, can be, could be, has been, had been, etc. A predicate nominative is a noun or pronoun that follows a linking verb and identifies, renames or explains the subject. It is considered a subject complement which completes the meaning of the linking verb. If a subject and its predicate nominative don’t have the same number, the verb still has to agree in number with the subject. An important crop in Florida is oranges. (The singular verb is agrees with the singular subject crop even though the predicate nominative is the plural oranges. 1 If we turn that sentence around to read: Oranges are an important crop in Florida. The subject is then the plural oranges and the verb should match it and not the singular predicate nominative of crop. 2 Titles are singular and take singular verbs. “The Langoliers” is a novel by Stephen King. Glover’s Cloth Goods is having a fabric sale. “The Grapes of Wrath” is a John Steinbeck novel. Who is it which does that? Who, which and that are generally relative pronouns and become the subject of a clause. An antecedent is the word the pronoun replaces or refers to. In this case the number of the verb will agree with the pronouns antecedent. George caught a fish that was 12 inches long. (The antecedent of the word ‘that’ is ‘fish’. Since fish is singular in this sentence the verb was is also singular.) Find three books that deal with economics. (’Books’ are plural so ‘deal’ must also be plural.) This concludes the series of subject and verb agreement. If all of this has left you confused, don’t feel too bad, it can be a bit complicated. Just refresh yourself with all these rules on a regular basis and it will eventually seem like second nature. Resource: 1, 2 Heath English Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately. |
| WordPress 2.8 - Widgets, Themes and Tags (oh my!) May 26, 2009 at 10:00 am |
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No software version is ever released on time with every requested feature in place - but WordPress 2.8 is looking to have a ton of new features. None of these changes have a dramatic impact on the interface, so the transition should be very easy for most administrators. WordPress Widgets One of the best features of WordPress 2.8 is the update to the widgets section. The current widget management often involves these steps: Your theme has two sidebars/widget areas and you want to move your text widget from first to the second sidebar. First, you remove it from the first sidebar and save changes. Then you select the second sidebar from the drop down menu, click “show" and add the widget to the second sidebar. In version 2.8 all your sidebars are now visible at once and you can drag and drop the required widgets into them. It’s a little bit of time traveling here, as an earlier version of WordPress had the widgets like this and it’s a welcome return! Plus, as soon as you place the widget into a sidebar, it will automatically show the widget's properties which can then be modified as needed. Another new widget feature is that you can have multiple instances of the same plugin. This long requested feature will allow you to use the widget, most likely with different settings, in different sections of your site. WordPress Themes The new features in theme management will make theme hunting as easy as plugin hunting. Essentially everything you can do with plugins you will be able to do with themes. For example, if you go to Appearance > Add New Themes and you will be able to search for a theme by any keyword you want. The search will allow you to apply different filters based on colors, columns, width and subject. Once you find a theme it will also be easier to try out a new theme - no more FTPing! This will be a huge boon to theme makers as many more users will be willing to try out new themes. In WordPress 2.7x when managing themes, you would have to click on a particular theme's image and then activate or discard them from the preview screen. In version 2.8 all you have to do is click on the activate link and the desired theme gets applied directly without showing you a preview. Additionally, you can also delete any unwanted themes from the same screen by clicking on the delete link. Old themes and plugins and like day old fish - best get rid of them before they smell too much! WordPress Tags In this version of WordPress, Tags finally get equal treatment with categories. Considering the role that tags play in search this is a valuable addition. A new sub-section has been added to the Posts section called Post Tags that contains all the tags that you have created for this blog. Similar to categories, you can now change the Tag name, Tag slug and even add a description for your tags (something that Drupal users have been accustomed to). This feature will be most useful for blogs which have multiple authors where the use of tags can quickly gets out of control with “tag, tagging, taggs, tags, WordPress tags” instead of just “WordPress tags.” Many More New Features This is just a summary of three areas where there are new features in WordPress 2.8. There are of course many behind-the-scenes updates for WordPress developers - particularly for widget developers. If you want to see ALL the new features, check out the official list of new WordPress 2.8 features. As always, it’s worth updating only after checking to make sure all your plugins have been verified to work in the new version. Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately. |
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| China's Ban on Blogger Blogs (and Possible Workarounds) May 25, 2009 at 10:00 am |
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Written by Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster There has been much speculation about China’s recently imposed “blanket ban” of all Blogger powered blogs. Some believe this is intended to quell references to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident, while others wonder if this is a technical difficulty as hinted on Blogger’s Known Issues page. In either case, this ban affects blogs hosted on the *blogspot.com subdomain (approximately 275 million) and also those who use a custom domain for their Blogger blogs (statistics of which are very difficult to gather). Here are the results of accessibility tests from WebsitePulse which show whether sites are accessible from within China:   According to logs from Herdict Web, Blogger powered sites have been blocked from around the 16th of May onwards; even today, there are dozens of references via Twitter from those in China who are unable to publish to their blogs or access websites they wish to visit:  What can we do to work around this ban, ensuring those in China can publish their blogs and access the sites they want to read? For bloggers in China who want to publish new posts Bloggers in China are unable to access their Blogger dashboard by regular means. However, there are other services which can still be accessed that can publish to Blogger on your behalf. Post by email Blogger has offered the “Mail to Blogger” service for quite some time, enabling bloggers to publish new posts while on the move. This enables us to write an email to our secret “Mail to Blogger” address which is then automatically published on our sites. The only downside to this is that the Mail to Blogger address must be set up from within the Blogger dashboard, so this service is only possible for China-based bloggers who have already set up their email address. A possible alternative is Posterous, which you can set up as a third party “Mail to Blogger” client using your blog’s unique ID number (which can also be found in the source code of your blog’s feed). Auto-post via Facebook or Ping.fm BlogIt is an app for Facebook which enables you to update multiple blogs and status feeds from your Facebook profile. Once you have installed this app in your Facebook profile, you will need to authorize use of your Blogger account (through Google hosted pages), after which you can update your blog via Facebook any time you like. Ping.fm is another alternative, offering a simple solution to update your Blogger blog (and other social profiles) from a single application. Using Ping.fm you can update via the web, IM, email and other third party applications. It is advisable to use Ping.fm for short posts only as no formatting options are enabled. To read Blogger powered blogs from within China For those wishing to read their favourite Blogger powered blogs from within China, here are a couple of possible solutions: Translate Blogger blogs Using Google Translate or Babelfish, you can circumvent the restrictions by viewing Blogger blogs in a translated page. This ensures that the URL of the site you are reading is based on a different server. Choose to translate from Chinese to English (or whichever translation you prefer) and paste the complete URL of the blog you wish to read. The blog will then be accessible for you to browse recent posts or archives with ease:  Unfortunately this does not appear to work when attempting to access the Blogger home page, so this workaround will not enable you to post from the Blogger dashboard. Subscribe to “banned” blogs using an RSS reader It is also possible to read updates from your favourite sites by reading in an RSS reader. Sign up to use Google Reader, BlogLines or Newsgator (none of which appear to be banned in China) and add the URL of the default feed for the Blogger blog you wish to read. This will be in the following format: http://your-favourite-blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. You will then be able to read the latest updates from your favourite blogs, though unfortunately it may be impossible to comment on these posts since this requires access to Blogger servers. Digital Inspiration also offers some interesting techniques to access banned sites from within China in this post. How to find out if your blog is banned in China The simplest way to discover if your blog (or website) is inaccessible from within China is to use this free tool from WebSitePulse. Paste the URL of your blog in the window and hit enter. After a few moments, you will be presented with results which show if your blog can be accessed from China and comparitively with other servers from different continents. How to find out if your ISP is blocking Blogger blogs To discover if you will be able to access Blogger powered blogs through your internet service provider, it is advisable to ping blogspot.com using your computer’s DOS ping tool. If you use Windows, you can do this by clicking the “Start” button and choosing the “run” command. Type “cmd” into the box and hit “enter”. Then type ping blogspot.com into the black box followed by enter. For unrestricted access to blogspot.com through your ISP, you will see something like this on your screen: Pinging blogspot.blogger.com [208.73.210.121] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 208.73.210.121: bytes=32 time=329ms TTL=239 Ping statistics for 208.73.210.121: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 294ms, Maximum = 337ms, Average = 323ms In cases where the URL is blocked, you will likely receive a message like “Ping request could not find the host. Please check and try again. Final thoughts It seems unlikely that Blogger powered sites will be accessible from within China in the close future, though as we have seen before, such restrictions are usually lifted after a period of time. I hope the information and tips in this article assist those who need to post to their blogs or read Blogger powered sites from within China. Please feel free to offer your own suggestions and comments below. Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.Written by Amanda Fazani from  |
| Confusing Words and Homonyms: Part 4 "M, N, O, P, and Q" May 25, 2009 at 5:00 am |
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Written by Patricia Vennes from Stiletto Woman Words can give us many problems all the time. Homonyms are words that sound the same, but have different meanings and are spelled differently. These words can cause a writer to say something that they don’t mean and end up sounding like a third grader. There is hope on the horizon though. This list will go through confusing words and homonyms from "M" to "Q", but if you missed any previous posts you can find them here. Made: to create. "We made a house out of sticks." Maid: a cleaning person. "Cinderella was a maid for her stepmother." Mail: correspondence. "Go get the mail!" Male: opposite of female. "Male animals have an extra appendage between their legs." Main: primary. "Use the main exit when we burn the house down." Mane: long hair. "Let’s braid the lions mane." Manner: behavior. "If you continue to behave in this manner I will have to shoot you." Manor: residence. "The 18th century manor has sixteen rooms with only one lavatory." Marry: to be wed. "Jack won’t marry Jill because he wants to marry Jeremy." Merry: to be happy. "His merry smile lit up the room." Meat: animal flesh. "Zombies eat the meat of people." Meet: an event or to touch. "The meet is at two o’clock." or "Our hands meet in the middle." Mind: intelligence or to obey. "She has a brilliant mind." or "You better mind your mother or I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap." Mined: excavated ores. "Frank mined the coal for the corporation." Miner: someone who extracts ores. "Frank is a miner." Minor: someone under age or small. "She’s only twelve, so she’s a minor." or "This is only a minor mistake." Missed: failed to hit. "He missed his target and the cow got away." Mist: fog. "The mist comes into the bay in waves of white." Mood: a state of emotion. "Matt is in a foul mood this morning like always." Mooed: the sound a cow made. "Sally the cow mooed all night long at the beautiful moon." Morning: beginning of the day. "The sun is shinning brightly this morning." Mourning: sorrow or grieving. "We are mourning the loss of our beloved cow Sally" Mustard: yellow condiment. "If you put mustard on my hamburger I’m going to attack you." Mustered: gathered. "He mustered up the courage to ask her to the dance." Naval: pertaining to ships. "The naval base is right by the water and it contains all of the gray war ships." Navel: belly button. "Pull your shirt down; your navel is showing." None: not any. "I want an apple, but there are none." Nun: female member of a religious order. "The nun holds her rosary in her hands as she prays." Oar: a paddle for rowing. "Don’t let the oar fall into the lake." Or: conjunction. "You can have chocolate or nothing at all!" Ore: metal bearing mineral. "We found an iron ore when digging for gold." On: to be on top of something. "She is on the roof." Onto: the act of getting on. "She is going to go onto the roof." One: single unit. "There is only one answer and that is my answer, which is the correct one." Won: past tense of win. "The math-lets won the pi competition." Overdo: to excess. "Don’t overdo your makeup, you’ll end up looking like a hooker." Overdue: past due. "Your books are overdue by a week and a half." Packed: past tense of pack. "We packed last night." Pact: an agreement. "Let’s make a pact to never stab each other again." Pail: a bucket. "Don’t spill the milk pail because I want soggy cereal this morning." Pale: lacking color. "The pale light does not help the campers see very well." Pair: two of something. "The pair of lovers held hands eternally in the black box." Pare: to remove or peel. "I will pare the orange so I can get to the delicious middle." Pear: type of fruit. "I will have a pear today instead of an apple." Palate: roof of the mouth. "To vampires, blood tastes wonderful on the palate." Pallet: portable platform. "Bring the pallet to the middle of the stage so we can stand on it." Palette: a board to hold and mix colors. "He mixed orange and blue on his palette." Passed: past tense of pass. "We have passed this house twice already." Past: the time before the present. "The past will always haunt us." Patience: willing to wait. "You must have patience if you want to lose weight." Patients: people under the care of a doctor. "You let the patients escape from the psych ward!" Peace: calm. "The sea is at peace tonight without crashing waves." Piece: a portion of something. "I want a piece of cake." Plain: simple, without extravagance. "Her dress is so plain it could be a rag." Plane: flat surfaces or short for airplane. "The cattle graze on the plane." or "The plane will land in twenty minutes." Pole: a piece of wood or metal. "Put the pole against the fence so it won’t fall." Poll: a survey. "The poll asked voters if they preferred cheese over crackers." Pore: a small hole. "My pore is filled with pus." Pour: to send liquid. "Pour one cup of oil into the pan before you begin." Praise: approval. "The teacher did not speak words of praise to the evil class." Prays: make a request to a higher being. "The mouse prays to the cheese." Preys: huts for food. "A cat preys upon a fly." Presence: appearance. "Your presence is requested at the Living Dead Festival." Presents: gifts or offers. "She received many presents at her birthday party." Pries: wedges open. "She desperately pries open the ice cream." Prize: reward. "The prize is a ham sandwich and a cucumber salad." Profit: gain. "Our profit this quarter is down by two percent." Prophet: a seer or predictor. "The mouse believes that the cheese is a prophet of good and evil in its future." Pros: experts or professionals. "Let the pros handle the schizophrenic." Prose: literature. "Please read Hinton’s prose before you come to class tomorrow." Quarts: units to measure liquid. "Place two quarts of orange juice into the blender." Quartz: a mineral. "He has a shinny quartz ring that glimmers in the sun." Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.Written by Patricia Vennes from  | | | |
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| Blogs and the Right Business Model May 24, 2009 at 3:00 pm |
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Written by Rob Starr from Rob Starr Getting the most from any Internet-based business usually involves three different aspects. The Right Site You need to make some decisions when you’re starting an online business about the kind of blog that you want to have. Remember that these are the modern day version of the business card so you’ll want to be sure that you present yourself and your goods or service in the best possible light. You need to take into account your budget as this could be the difference in some cases between video and a good ppc campaign when it comes to marketing. As well you need to look at the size of the operation you run and your financial position. All these things help to determine the tone and the features of your site. Payment Methods With the first section out of the way, there are several other choices that you’ll want to make including how you will ask you customers to pay. The first option is as you might expect the most basic. It allows you to take orders through email or via an online form that you put on your website. This is generally the method that the newcomer uses so that they can get a footing in the business. It’s important to note here that the business using this model needs to communicate quite extensively with the customer to ensure that all the terms are accepted by both parties. Electronic Payment However, the best method for efficiency and customer satisfaction is electronic payment. Of course there is the obvious reason why this is the best business model for taking payment in that once it’s set up it’s the easiest and requires the least interaction and synchronization between the front end and the back end of your business. Still you need to remember here that this is the best model for the business if the products or services that you are selling have a fixed price. Total Integration At the top of the line is what’s refereed to as total integration. This high end occurs when the front end and the backend work in conjunction with each other in that orders can be placed and go right through to the inventory and/or shipping departments at the back end of the procedure. Getting the right business model in place can be just as important as any of the promotional aspects that you choose. Copyright © 2009 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.Written by Rob Starr from  | | | | |
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