How to create a Free Professional Blog with BlinkWeb?

Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the blogging platforms for the new bloggers, we often restrain our reviews by the big players in this marketing niche only (like Blogger, for example). However, there are many small players, who may offer quite impressive set of features and capabilities.

Today, we are going to present of the sites, which can easily compete with big boys – BlinkWeb.  It’s one of those websites that surprisingly offers you their services for free without any loopholes and hassles. The site was founded in June 2008 by Brad and Matthew Callen, the company is based in Indiana, USA.

BlinkWeb offers you to create professionally looking website or blog with simplicity and speed of the drag and drop functionality. You can easily create all the major website types such as a blogs, a content style websites, or a sales letter style websites. The blogging platform was developed with novice users in mind. However, those with moderate experience, basically anyone who doesn’t know the least bit about html and other coding stuff, can still very easily make use of this platform. Blinkweb comes equipped with many high quality website templates that users can select from, making the new blog unique in the blogosphere.

To get started with the service is pretty simple: you just need to sign up for a new account on BlinkWeb. It is easy as well. Simply enter your chosen username, password and your email address on the homepage of the site in the signup box. It’s free to sign up and use BlinkWeb, depending on where you want to host your site you may have to pay a fee.

The Blinkweb page builder is completely free. After the user creates their website, they are presented with 3 main options which include; get a subdomain for your website, get a domain name for your website, or download your website in .zip format. Users will be able to get a subdomain completely free, which is then hosted by our servers. Users can also choose to get a domain from Blinkweb. Domain names are completely free as well. Should the user choose to get a domain name, Blinkweb will host their website for $1.00 the first month and then $14.95 for each month thereafter. Users can have unlimited domains with Blinkweb. Each additional domain is only an extra $1.30/month. Finally, if users prefer to host their websites with their current webhost, rather than through Blinkweb, they can choose the 3rd option, which is to download their website in .zip format. Doing so costs only a very small fee. Blinkweb also offers an extensive line of training tools and guides to earning money strictly from an online business. These tools come in the form of videos, workbooks, and audio CDs.

It incorporates the following features:

• It has a very user friendly interface, even a novice can get a hang of it in no time.
• You can download website to your own computer
• It very conveniently lets you build websites by simply dragging and dropping components
• You can also add few add-on and plug-in like AdSense, contact forms, guestbooks and maps according to your requirement.
• The basic services comes for free but if you are looking for trying out and applying more advanced features then you will be charged accordingly.

Access Website Homepage: http://business.blinkweb.com/

Google Instant Search and Marketing Concerns

Google recently introduced their “Instant Search” feature which starts to populate search results the instant you start typing into the search box. At the same time, Google suggests alternate search terms as you type to help narrow your search without forcing you to enter entire search phrases.

The main idea behind this new feature is to save users a few seconds on each search and cut down on misspellings for search terms, business names or product names. Users may not notice much difference in their overall experience, however, for small businesses and online entrepreneurs, this new search method carries a few interesting ramifications.

Since Google clearly ranks as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online marketing world, acting as de facto gateway to the Web for millions, any change to their system makes businesses nervous. Many have expressed concern that this latest change will force users of Google’s AdWords program, the search giant’s lucrative pay-per-click marketing arm, to pay for more expensive keywords.

They reason that since the most popular search terms appear in the search box first, and that most people will opt to accept Google suggestions, those most popular searches will carry the highest click prices. In other words, businesses that depend on Google to show their ads fear that Google will force them to pay more money by recommending more expensive keyword searches.

But that might not be a real future!

The suggested search term feature actually appeared on Google quite a while ago, and all that’s really changed is Google starts to display the actual search results AS you type. With the old 2-step process, Google made suggestions as you typed and then you clicked the search button to see the search results.

Instant Search just creates a FAST way to see the results for different search variations without forcing you to click the button each time to see those results. This process makes it simple to see the results, change your mind, and not wait for the results each time you change the phrase.

Most people always start with a broad search and then narrow it by including more descriptive terms (often called “long-tail” keywords) to better find what they want. This new process won’t change that.

In fact, it will give people more chances to refine their searches on-the-fly by providing Google more details of what they want. Instead of posing a threat, I believe this new Instant Search feature creates an opportunity for any business to perform high-speed market research to look for possible opportunities and trouble spots.

The following four steps will help any small business use Google’s new feature for instant results.

1. Go to Google and search for your business as if you were a consumer.

2. Make a note of the keyword suggestions Google offers as you type.

3. See if those suggestions give you any ideas for your own marketing (since they should represent the most popular phrases).

4. Note which competitors show up and where you appear in relation to them.

These 4 simple steps make a great barometer for taking a read on your local market, fast.

Who appears consistently?

Who shows up hit-and-miss or every once in a while?

Who shows up in Google Maps?

If your competitors show up and you don’t, you’ve got some work to do!

Bottom line: as a small business, use Google’s new Instant Search to quickly get the big picture when it comes to your business, industry, and local competition.

Source and Additional Information:

 http://smallbusinessmarketingweekly.com/

http://www.webguild.org/20100909/google-instant-implications-for-users-advertisers-website-operators

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641319

101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden

In this post, I would like to present an ebook - 101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden from http://www.toptenblogtips.com/. As the title claims, the ebook contains 101 essential tips for all bloggers, no matter how technical you are, or which platform you use.

The ebook is divided into 10 sections, each containing 10 tips:

1. Advertising and Promotion
2. Blogging Personalities
3. Comments
4. Content
5. Design
6. Guest Posts
7. Networking
8. Overcoming blogger's block
9. Planning
10. Post frequency

Tip #101 is provided at the end of the ebook.

You can download the ebook here:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/11644427/Ben_Barden_-_101_tips_for_improving_your_blog.pdf.html

It's a free download, so you can share it with no restriction.

How to submit blog sitemap to Bing?

As you know, Search Engine Bing, powered by Microsoft, is one of the new successful additions to the marketing niche, dominated by Google. You may need to consider seriously your exposure to the Bing searchers, besides focusing on Google and Yahoo! To get more visibility, you can follow the simple steps, described below.

1. The first thing is to create an account or use one you already have for the services of pages of Microsoft, like Hotmail.

2. If this is the first time you access the service and never have sent your URL, you will see the option to "Add Site. You can have multiple websites / blogs in the same account.

3. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
* Click the "Add Site" to add the URL of your blog.

* Enter the address of your blog where it says.
* And click on "Submit" to submit your request.

4. Verify your ownership of your website.

Webmaster Tools requires authentication to ensure that only the rightful owners are provided with information about their websites. There are two ways to prepare your website for authentication, both of which rely on your adding an authentication code your website. You need to do only one of them to get verified.

* "Option 1" offers blog authorship verification by hosting a XML file on your Web Server, which is appropriate for the server hosted blogs (Wordpress.org, for example).

* "Option 2" represents a meta tag authorization by adding certain source code to your blog template (recommended for Blogger blogs).

As I am a Blogger platform user, I have applied the second approach, and it takes just a minute to complete site authorization. You can go to the panel, click on "Design" ~> "Edit HTML" and embed the generated line under the head. Then click the "Verify" button to let Bing to confirm your registration. Note that the tracking and displaying data indexing can take several days to begin to appear.

5. Adding sitemap of your blog

Now, when your blog has been successfully verified you can send its sitemap to get it crawled easier and help the algorithms to find and read its contents. Click on Add Sitemap on the line of your blog listing. At this point you have to add the address of the sitemap file to your blog.

* For blogs on Blogger (Blogspot) your map address definition is pretty simple. Just Enter the default address of RSS Feed, as in the example below:

URL- http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

* For wordpress.org blogs

You may use site maps generator Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Simply create or have created an XML file of your sitemap, hosted on your host and add the link as explained above, clicking the "Submit".