29 Different Types of Blog Posts

As an avid blogger, i write alot and a variety of different blog post types. I decided to write a list of the different types of posts i write across my network of blogs. To my surprise the list came in at 29. Below is the list.

Please bookmark, write about, link to, Stumble or Digg it. Thanxs, Missy.

1. The Story Post
2. The Review Post
3. The List Post
4. The How-To Post
5. The Feature Post
6. The Interview Post
7. The Link Love Post
8. Video Post
9. Photo Post
10. Breaking News Post
11. The Celeb Piece
12. Hot Trends
13. Deals, Discounts, and Freebies
14. "29 Tips" Post
15. Contest Post
16. The Q&A
17. Poll Post
18. Feature a Commenter
19. The Weekly Blog Post Round Up
20. Niche Local Alerts
21. Ask The Blog Owner
22. Blog Milestones (increased RSS subs, google rank, alexa)
23. Blog Owner Accomplishments (educational, certificates attained, etc)
24. Blog Owner Product News (NEW! ebook, report, etc)
25. Best Post Of The Month
26. Niche Post Round Up
27. Blow Owner personal News (family news, birth, marriage, new job, winning the lotto, etc)
28. Niche Gizmos & Gadgets
29. The Trivia Post

Regardless of your niche, your audience, or your type of blog, there are quite a variety of different types of blog posts you can write. Save this list for future reference, print it out or bookmark it.

Feel free to share your own (type of blog posts) below in the comments section.

The Secret To Article Marketing.

Jim Kukral, an established blogger and internet marketer, has decided to give article marketing a try, and see how much traffic he can garner by submitting articles to EzineArticles.com

Watch the video as Jim describes what he believes is "the secret" to generating traffic to your blog, with the use of article marketing. He has begun the article marketing experiment and will report back results in 30 days.

Watch the video for what he believes is "the secret" in article marketing.

Recycle me, send this post to your friends.

NEW Yahoo Messenger Affiliate Program from CJ

New affiliate program opportunity from the Yahoo Affiliate Program over at Commission Junction. The latest affiliate offering from Yahoo is The Yahoo Messenger. For every U.S. based subscriber you get to Download Yahoo! Messenger, nets you $1.00 commission.

Please note that CJ only counts IE browser based leads as valid. (IE=Internet Explorer) No Firefox referrals will count. Yahoo Messenger is a popular instant messaging tool, also known as an IM client. Easy, free, and popular (Yahoo Messenger) makes for a good affiliate program to promote.

Start your social media or email marketing campaign today, and earn $1.00 for every US and IE based download of Yahoo Messenger.

Should you Advertise on a Blog?

If you're not a blogger, but do have a website or sell stuff online, Should You Advertise on a Blog?

This is a valid question and Chad Randall over at AdvertiseSpace.com did a solid job on answering it. He wrote a kick-in-the-pants post on 7 Reasons YOU SHOULD Be Advertising on Blogs.

The reason which struck a chord with me the most, was #1, "Bloggers Are Very Influential". He goes on to state that the reason blogs have become a popular advertising medium is because,

"The powerful influencers are quickly shifting to the small voice. I’m not
talking Oprah here, I’m talking about the single parent stay-at-home mom that
loves the book, the 4 hour work week, and hates Windows Vista. Bloggers are
generating dedicated readers and followers that not only test out or buy a
product that they recommend, but the readers too are blogging about it. It’s a
waterfall of influence if even one prominent blogger likes your product. I
reference those to products, because that book popularity was spurn in the
blogosphere and Vista was killed by it. Bloggers can make or break your product.
Get in front of them early and let your product grow with them…"

For all "7 Reasons You Should be Advertising on Blogs" head over to Chad's site. Can you think of any other reasons why blogs have a become a go-to resource for marketing and promotion? Leave a comment below.

Bill Tracking Is Essential For Good Business

As a small business proprietor or innovative entrepreneur, the majority of business responsibilities fall on your shoulders. To Ensure that your business stays on track, you need to be diligent with your business expenses.

Even if you are using an accountant or other professional services to manage your spreadsheets for income and expense, it is up to you to track and record everything. Not only do you need to keep accurate records to grow a prosperous business, you will need a detailed account of expenditures for tax purposes. Your accountant or computer software can only produce as much good information as you provide.

As a sole proprietor, it is all too easy to get caught up in the trap of using personal money for business expenses. While it may be necessary during the initial startup phase, it will soon become important that business and personal financial matters do not continue to mingle.

One way to do this is by establishing a credit card account on behalf of the business and use it responsibly only for business related purchases. This will help you to easily track expenses through the itemized monthly statements. It will also help you to keep tabs on money spent in relation to the income you receive. Allocating income to pay the credit card bills every month will give you a guideline as to how much money you need to be earning every month to keep your business on track.

Keeping excellent records is important for so many reasons, some of which may not be initially recognized until you have been in business for a longer period of time. Projecting future financial figures will become increasingly important as you navigate through the business world.

If you plan to seek additional financial funds to expand your future by applying for a loan or approaching investors, your financial records from day one will become vital.

In addition to the expense tracking, opening a separate credit card account for your business will allow you to build up credit for your business. Today’s credit card offers are designed to fit the needs of small businesses and there are plenty of reward programs you can select from that will benefit your company.

Programs like cash back rewards, discounts on office supplies, and many other incentives were developed to support the interest of small businesses and entrepreneurs. Once you have established credit on behalf of your company, paying the bills on time and maintaining a solid credit history should become a priority.

People typically start a business with the intention of remaining open for the long-term. The financial records and credit you maintain during the early years will most certainly stay with you for a long period of time. Making the effort to do it correctly in the beginning will make a huge difference in the end.

Do not hesitate to enroll in a class or two to brush up on your record keeping skills or outsource the financial work to a professional who has the time to work with you every step of the way. Simply handing over your information to another party with no communication or follow through is a recipe for disaster.

Stay on top of your financial records at all times and be diligent about tracking and recording each and every bit of income and expense for your business.

******
This was a guest-post from Tisha Kulak. Tisha is a writer for Creditorweb.com, where she writes about business credit cards and responsible credit card use. If you would like to write a guest-post for Groovy Entrepreneur, just shoot me an email.

Are you net addicted? Does such a thing even exist?

Interesting article today on Yahoo Tech, where doctors are mulling over the inclusion of "internet addiction" into the books. The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", book will come out again in 2012, and this is the book that lists all the recognized mental disorders.

Read what one doctor has to say about it,

"Dr. Jerald Block of the Oregon Health and Science University is the latest voice pushing for this inclusion, noting that tech junkies display genuinely debilitating behavior, including drug-like cravings, withdrawal, and a constant need for more and better gear - just like a substance addict might exhibit".

I personally believe that this is a problem and will only grow with time, severe cases will pop up, like someone found in their chair who spent the last 20 hours on the net, and expired from too much gaming or twitter-ing.

How much time do you spend on your websites and blogs in a week?

3 Domain Names Up For Sale

I wanted to give my readers and visitors a heads up on a domain sale i'm having. I have a few names i'm offering up for grabs, see list below. If interested, contact me via this blog.

Blogs-4-Sale.com
EnviroAffiliates.com
GroovyLocal.com

These domain names are all registered with Namecheap. Mostly i bought them for development into blogs, but my time is quite strapped tight. So i'm selling these for now.

Get the name you want at Afternic!

Blogging Tip #42 - Keeping Track of Comments

I'm constantly forgetting where i leave comments, because i visit so many blogs and sites on a regular daily basis. So here is blogging tip #42. If you use Wordpress, there are several wordpress plugins to help forgetful souls like me to keep track of comments left. One that i like and use on several of my blogs is appropriately called, Subscribe to Comments. If you don't have this on your blog, go add it. Trust me, it will help in bringing people back who have left you a comment.

If you're on blogger, you're in luck, because recently Blogger realized the importance of this also, and added a field in the comments section, which allows commenters to be notified of follow-up comments. Simple, but genuis move on the part of Blogger.

There is one more i want to share with you, this one is a third party app, it is called Commentful, and can be used on a variety of sites, not just blogs. This one is feature rich, and not too difficult to install or add.

It's simple to forget where we leave comments, but there are several tools that exist to solve this problem. That concludes blogging tip #42.

inspiration - 10 best plugins for comments

3 Easy Ways to Keep Ranking High in Search Engines

Blogging entrepreneurs know more than anyone the importance of search engine rankings, or SEO. But with literally hundreds of thousands other blogs on the internet, how can you keep yours closer to the top?

Here are 3 Easy Ways To Keep Your Blog at The Top:

1. Keywords

Your posts should be simple, straightforward and comfortably readable by visitors. When you consider your post topic, stick to one keyword or phrase. If you're blogging about laptop batteries in general, don't frequently switch between different brand names as examples. Use the phrase laptop battery as often as comfortably possible, switching out pronouns like "it" whenever you can. The more often a certain phrase is used in your blog post, the clearer it will be to the search engines what your blog is about. This is SEO 101.

2. Stay Focused

Just above, don't float from one topic to another. Most blog posts should be in the 200 - 500 word range. Stick to one topic per post, and keep it focused, concise and clear. This will give the search engines, and your readers, a simple message each time. People visit commercial blogs to get quick snippets of information. If they are looking for information on laptop batteries, that's what they want to read about. Keep your post dedicated to one main point, and if the information is pertinent to another subject link to (or from) the other information.

3. Get Links

This is probably the simplest part. Consider the broad topic of your blog, and write a few general articles on it. Then, take that article, and submit it to free article directories, like Associated Content or Hub Pages, along with a backlink to your blog. You can also create free blogs (like those here at Blogger) and post snippets or teasers of your full blog post. Use sites like Squidoo or WetPaint to showcase portions of your blogs focus (a lens on maintaining a laptop, or a Wiki on computer models). Most important is that you stick within your niche, and only get links from related blogs or sites. Relevancy is key.


These 3 tips will provide relevant and useful content to your readers, while increasing your blog's presence on the net. Try these 3 methods in your blog and watch traffic and rankings increase.

5 Top Wordpress Plugins for Blog Entrepreneurs

You've planned and prepared, and now you have your blog. If you're like hundreds of thousands of self-hosted bloggers out there, you're using WordPress. Besides the fact that it's extremely easy to use, WordPress is extraordinarily expandable, lending itself to hundreds of different plug-ins to extend the features of the program.

Choose your plugins carefully though, as each plugin will increase your blog's load time just abit. Without further ado, here are "5 Top WordPress Plugins for Blog Entrepreneurs".

1. All-In-One SEO Pack
This plug in will extend the tagging, description and title functions of each of your posts to make them a bit more search engine friendly. All-In-One SEO adds the extra fields to your header "meta" data, and you specify the tags, title and description when you create your post. You can also use it to "rename" your title bar text to something more user friendly.

2. Anarchy Media
Anarchy Media is a quick little plug in that lets you easily embed videos from YouTube, Google, Revver and most other video sharing sites. With the click of a button, you can insert a new video and set its size and location in your post or page.

3.CForms II
This is an extremely useful and versatile contact form plug in. You can use CForms II to create any number of individual contact forms to embed in posts or pages, or to replace the built in WordPress comments function. Be warned : CForms II, while very useful, also has a very high learning curve. After installation, expect to spend 20 to 30 minutes reading documentation.

4. WPPost Ratings
WPPost Ratings does exactly what the title says : it lets your readers rate your posts. You add one piece of information to each post/page you'd like to be rateable, and a 5-start rating system is available for your readers. This is also particularly useful for product or program review blogs, or for developers who offer code available for download.

5. AdSense Injection
With this one page plug in, you can automatically "inject" AdSense into your posts. In the admin panel, you specify your publisher ID, some styling options and ad location within the post. On the front end, your ads will appear where you want, without requiring you to add any extra code.

There are loads more, these are but a small sampling of useful Wordpress plugins you should take a look at.


Which other Wordpress plugins do you recommend?

Groovy Entrepreneur Biz Card Wallet

I typed in my blogs name in Google, and towards the bottom of the search results was a listing for a (Groovy Entrepreneur) business card wallet.

Naturally i was curious as to what this item was, so i clicked on it, and found a funky 70's physcedellic print business card wallet from Etsy. I'm gonna send an email to the seller (katesy) and let her know this is too darling, and that she picked a great name for it. (wink wink)

NOTE: I'm in no way affiliated with this item, the shop, or the seller.

3 Ways To Monetize Your Blogs

I've been blogging since April 2007, and i like to think i've learned a few tricks since those early days. I have several blogs, including my main flagship blog ( Groovy Vegetarian ) a blog dedicated to the most wonderful city in the world, ( Groovy Chicago ), and of course this one, my ( online entrepreneur ) blog.

I have recently begun looking into monetization methods for these and all my online properties, and as of today, my blog money makers include:

1. Google Adsense
2. Direct Private Ads
3. Affiliate Marketing

Let's take a closer look at each model. Below are my experiences and opinions so far.

GOOGLE ADSENSE

My income with Google Adsense has increased steadily since i added it to all my blogs, and is now making me money daily. I should hit the elusive $100 payout very soon. This is perhaps the easiest blog monetization method, but you wont get rich quick quick with this one, Google Adsense takes time. Essentially you just slap the code on your site, work on bringing in traffic, and the ads delivered are based on your sites content.


Easy Score: Super Duper Easy


DIRECT PRIVATE ADS

As for private ads, i've set up an advertisers page on my flagship blog, and the inquiries are now starting to trickle in. I also use Project Wonderful, a new advertisers marketplace where ad space is sold via auction. My biggest pet peeve with this site is that it is not very consistent. Advertisers peep in and out throughout the day with their penny auctions. Its quite annoying. I had my sites listed at .30 per day (which equals to about $10 month) but because of the flaky nature of the auction model PW uses, i decided just this weekend to bump-up the daily rate to $1.00

Easy Score: Easy Enough


AFFILIATE MARKETING

This is by far the most challenging for me, but carries a great deal of potential. My aim is to master it and use it regularly on all my sites. My biggest mistake to date with A.M. is signing-up with too many affiliate networks, now im drowning in options and way too many offers to choose from. The biggest two networks are Commission Junction and LinkShare. Another (but fairly new one) is PepperJam.

With affiliate marketing, the positives are that you get to choose which product or site you promote, payouts are pretty good, and there is alot of flexibility involved. The negatives are you have to seek from a plethora of offers, sometimes relevant offers aren't available, and trial and error is the name of the game. My best advice here is to pick one (or two) top networks and work with these exclusively till you gain more knowledge and experience.

Easy Score: Most Challenging, but greatest potential for income


Internet marketing is a vast and interesting field, i love it. With the constant challenges, there is always something to learn. As i get more experienced and make more money online, i will share more of what i have learned and also what has not worked.

To close, i want to share with you, some of my favorite resources for blog monetization, SEO, and general online income research. Problogger, Just Make Money Online, Net Business Blog, and One Mans Goal. (each provides invaluable advice daily)

YOUR TURN

If you run a blog and have found easy monetization methods, other than the ones i have mentioned above, please share them below. Thx, Missy.