Blogging Tips

Blogosphere News / November 21st

In today, I have a new selection of news and interesting links to share from all around the blogosphere.

WordPress News

WordPress 2.7 is approaching rapidly. The 3rd Beta version is up for grabs and the Icon design competition ended with the folks at WP selecting two wonderful contest entries as their main icon sets for WordPress 2.7.

I’d suggest taking a quick look at Technosailor’s post, as Aaron shares 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7.

Blog monetization

MediaWhiz (Text Link Ads) launched a new advertising product called InLinks. This product allows advertisers to buy “do follow” links in your blog’s content, a thing that doesn’t quite appeal to Google and so, I’d advise you to proceed carefully with this advertising method.

Find out more about InLinks on:

• ProBlogger: InLinks - TextLinkAds 2.0
• BloggingTips.com: TLA InLinks Officially Launched

Tip’s - The Financial Digg - is out of Beta

Tip’d, a social bookmarking site, similar to Digg, but focusing of the financial niche, has officially ended the public Beta and is running the 1.0 version. Looking at the figures, this milestone is proving to be a good achievement in a field where more and more diggers and stumblers are being banned because of their “financial interests”.

Read more about Tip’d on ‘The Blog Herald’.

Group Writing Projects

The folks at ‘Blog Design Studio’ have launched an interesting group writing project. The topic is wide enough and gives you the possibility to approach from many angles: Blog Design. Why should you join? Exposure, backlinks, fun, amazing prizes and…. I’m one of the jury members! Looking forward to reading your ultra-cool blog design posts! Project ends November 30th.

Quite a while ago, Joanna Young from ConfidentWriting.com launched her own group writing project on “experimenting”. A nice selection of entries seem to already be added to the list and you can still submit yours, since the deadline is November the 30th. Do drop by her blog and find out more about this project.

Quickfire News and Links

Also, if you’re looking to read something good today, take a look at the following link:

• Syed Balkhi puts up a compilation of 113 Ways to Make Money Online;
• Adrian Diaconescu (Rubiqube.com) share eight, well documented, tips for writing clean WordPress blog posts;
• ShoeMoney launches a new, revamped Keyword Tracking Tool

Guest Posting in the Upscale Level of the Blogosphere

Becoming friends with popular bloggers is an important goal for all those just starting or wanting to get their blogs into the spotlight. After starting to comment on the blogs you love, you’ve realized guest posting on those very same blogs would help tighten the relationship and also bring you increased exposure and new waves of visitors. So you’ve added a new task on your blogging calendar.

Now that you’ve made up your mind about guest-posting, you’ve come up with a list of popular blogs in your niche and in related fields where it would be great for you to be featured as contributor. And an important question arises: how to convince the blog owner you’d add value to his or her blog through your guest entry?

First, get acquainted with the topics and general style of the blog. Yes, you read the blog almost daily. But have you really asked yourself why exactly you like what you read, how the topics are chosen and how they are related with past entries? Have you thoroughly analyzed the views and style, or have you just enjoyed the reading without realizing what exactly was causing your state of mind? Being thorough will do wonders and lead you to pitching a great post idea.
Click here to read the full blog post!

Kontain - Flash-based Blogging Platform

Yesterday, Fi (Fantasy Interactive) sent out alpha invitations to their new product, Kontain.

This is one product I’ve signed up and (not very) patiently waited for its launch, as it should be pretty revolutionary in terms of user-friendliness. Basically, it’s the first Flash-based blogging platform open to world wide free public access.

Here’s how the folks at Fi describe Kontain:

Kontain is a free destination for users to media blog and share photos, videos and audio with friends, family, colleagues and even beautiful strangers. The core of each user's experience is media-driven and Kontain takes the everyday concept of blogging to a wider audience by making it easy for users of all demographics to "kontain" and share their life online. Simple enough for Mom and Dad, yet flexible and sophisticated for a web veteran, Kontain aims to be the Internet's premier destination for user-generated content.

The Alpha launch features (which would soon be backed up by a lot more features that are currently under development) as listed on the Kontain website are:

• Easy to Kontain your life
• Upload Photos, Videos and Audio
• Explore Kontain’s most popular
• Search the media way
• Personal dashboard
• Ratings and Popularity
• Commenting
• Basic privacy settings

A look into what’s in development shows us high resolution media uploads, galleries and collections, messaging, groups, subscriptions, stats, possibility of having your “kontainer” embedded on other websites, multimedia comments, rich(er) text editing, notes over multimedia and many more features.
Click here to read the full blog post!

Who Are You?

The last time I did this was back in May, when Blogsessive had ten times less subscribers and definitely less awareness. All this time, I’ve tried to write quality posts and give back to my community resources like the Simple Balance theme and the Feedsessive free RSS Icon set.

With each post, I put a small piece of me out to the world. Every reader can find out more about Blogsessive and me and I really love reading your emails, even it they are simply “Hello” emails or in need of advice.

The downside of it is that while concentrating on delivering quality through my actions and posts, I did not get to know more about you, the readers of Blogsessive. And I mean YOU. Who are you, are you a blogger? What do you blog about? What do you do for a living? Even personal stuff that you want to share. Feel free to ask questions, I’ll be happy to answer.

As I’ve said about a million times: my full respect and attention goes to my community, and a community is made out of real people, people just like you, the one reading this lines. So, give me 2 minutes of your life and let’s sit back to a friendly talk.

PS: First time commentator? Don’t be shy, join in! That’s how we become friends!

Online Shops with WordPress & WP e-Commerce Plugin

The flexibility of WordPress has always been its strong point. The fact that you can tweak and twist it to your own will with just a bit of knowledge and an extraordinary support from a large community of developers and blogger transformed what initially was a blogging tool into a powerful website CMS, may it be a blog, photoblog, portfolio or simple presentation website.

And since its flexibility is undisputed, the folks at Instinct, a New Zealand development company, took it a little further with their WP e-Commerce plugin.

Here’s what they have to say about their plugin:

The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.

Let’s see about that!
Click here to read the full blog post!