The Web’s Biggest Foe in China is the Government. Here, it’s Hollywood.
When you look back at the origins of PIPA and SOPA, two bills before the US senate this year dealing with the Internet, you’ll see they 
more than likely started fermenting in the days of Napster and other free files sharing websites.
The forces that be in the entertainment industry are railing against the copying on intellectual property online with these bills and there’s two sides here that seem to be gearing up for an epic battle that concerns us about the implications for Internet censorship.
In one corner are the people like the Country Music Association and the United States Chamber of Commerce. On the other side of the debate are the usual friendly faces like Google , Facebook and Twitter. One group wants a way to protect the items produced by the movie industry and record labels, and the other group wants the web protected from censorship.
It’s too easy to paint this whole thing in a simple Us versus Them scenario, but the fact remains that when you open one of these doors, all kinds of bad things can happen. Still, before we all go waving the Power To The People flags, it’s important to remember that 2.2 million people are having their livings compromised by the kind of online theft these bills want to combat.
Advocates for freedom on the Internet like NetCoalition have no issues with plugging the holes that allow for this problem and cost the American economy every year, they’re just concerned these news bills seem to want Internet providers to police the people who subscribe.
Of course what makes it all worse is the fact that many Congress members have admitted they really don’t understand the issues that surround the bill.
Back to China. When a country gives out the China Internet Self-Discipline Award to executives from industry, it’s really time to start dusting off that old copy of 1984. There are only eight gateways whereby the Chinese Internet filters lets in the rest of the world and this makes it all more easy to be selective about what gets through.
Most people in that land are unaware of what exists beyond this firewall and only the most Internet savvy people there know how to get around these measures. All this comes from a new book called Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, by Rebecca MacKinnon
Hopefully, Hollywood wont be sending emissaries there to learn what they can get away with on this side of what’s still a relatively free web.
Copyright © 2012 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.
The Two Biggest Guest Blogging Mistakes You Can Make
I receive around 20 guest post submissions per week. Usually I let them pile up and once a month I go through all of them, replying to the ones I think would be a good fit for the blog.
There are two types of submissions I discard right away, though, without even taking a look. I also consider those the two biggest mistakes you can make while trying to guest post on some blog. They are:
1. Not including the name of the blog owner
If by opening your email I see something like “Dear Sir” or “Dear Blog Owner” I’ll send it to the trash bin immediately. Why? because it tells me that this is a generic guest post offer, and that you probably sent the same post to dozens of other blogs.
The least you can do is to visit the site where you want to guest post and to discover the name of the owner.
2. Not including the post itself
Many of the guest post emails I receive are only asking if I would be interested in having a guest post written. Something like this:
Dear Daniel,
I have been your blog for a long time, and I was wondering if you would be interested in having me to write a guest post for you. I was thinking to write something about Facebook marketing or email marketing.
Please let me know and we’ll get moving.
Thanks,
John Doe
My thoughts when I see such emails: “How on earth can I know if I would be interested in having your guest post if I don’t know how you write or what ideas you have?”.
Sometimes the person will include the title of the guest post. Same deal. How can I approve or reject a guest post just by looking at the title?
Sure, I could reply explaining this to the person, but why waste my time?
Want to start making some money with your website? Join my OnlineProfits.com training program today, it's free!
Original Post: The Two Biggest Guest Blogging Mistakes You Can Make
4 Biggest Blogging Myths That Lead to Bloggers Giving Up
This is a guest post by Marya. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
If you are new to the world of blogging, there are few pieces of advice that you can never, ever escape.
The sad thing is the most of them are utter non sense – huge time wasters. In fact, if you are spending time following them, you are doing your blog a great injustice – and to yourself as well.
And because you don’t get to see results of any kind, you are bound to feel like throwing in the towel – once and for all.
Here are few of my top favourites.
1. Post Daily
Not when you are starting out.
There is no point is spending hours on creating content when nobody’s looking -nobody’s reading.
Also remember you are learning yourself in the early days; you are bound to make mistakes. You need to spend more time educating yourself about all aspects of blogging; design, content, promotion, marketing, SEO, basic technical stuff etc, instead of freaking out about creating content on a daily basis.
Spend 30% of your time writing posts; even twice a week is good. Spend the rest of the time learning about what it takes to write a successful blog, connecting with other bloggers in your niche and writing guest posts.
The correct advice: Post regularly, doing the best you can. Keep to a schedule so people know what to expect. Spend your energies on educating yourself.
2. Content is King
If you are new, this is what you believe right?
If you have been there, done that, you know this is simply not true, at least not when done in isolation, not in the beginning anyway.
It doesn’t matter how good you are as a writer, how many blogging talents you possess, people simply won’t read your content because they can’t find it.
On top of it, you are not the only talented one you know, there are hundreds, no thousands of genius bloggers are looking for attention.
Blogosphere is changed. In the beginning there were few talented bloggers, now there are many. There is a huge supply and the only way to stand out is by making connections with bloggers – by networking, by guest posting.
Only when you have allies in the blogging world, when they start spreading the word about you, people will start taking notice. They will help promote your content, like it, tweet it, link to it.
And once you have established yourself, you can relax and focus on your content only. Then it will be the right time to invest allyour energies in your content.
3. Comment on other blogs to drive traffic to your blog
Ahh – this ons is by far the most misunderstood piece of advice there is. And I am guilty of doing the same.
You see, when my blog was new, I was given this advice and so I dutifully commented – a lot.
Except, I somehow made the comment about my blog, and my writing. The worst part was that I didn’t even realize it.
I thought, here is my chance of getting discovered, the blogger will notice me and my writing, and get in touch me to personally let me know how my content has wowed them. Guess what, doesn’t happen.
Unless, the comment is on their content. Then it will catch their eye.
On the other hand, you might be writing thinking that your comments will catch interest of other commentators and they will flock to your blog to find who this amazing blogger is.
Wrong again.
Most commentators don’t have the time to read all the comments anyway, do you?
And if you are commenting on blogs for these two reasons, you are going it the wrong way anyway.
- Comment on posts where you genuinely things to add, where you feel that input is really useful. Forget about the notion that you are doing this to drive traffic.
- Comment with the idea that you are commenting for the blogger. Be detailed in your comments if you can. Treat your comments as mini guest posts.
Few people are known to have received invitations to write guest posts for popular blogs based on what they had said in their comment. They were asked to expand on it. Fantastic right? Nevertheless, do not post with the intention of getting something out of it, and you might be surprised after all.
4. You need tons of traffic to be successful
All traffic is not created equal.
If you are not getting huge amounts of traffic from social media sites, don’t stress to the point of making yourself sick.
Traffic that seems to come from huge sites such as stumbleupon, delicious or digg seem to come in a wave. They leave as soon as they have seen your post. Even twitter is not particularly good in this regard. Not many people actually follow from twitter, fewer are likely to become regular readers. Shares or likes to facebook seem the better option as people doing this are more likely to stay.
You might tons of traffic coming your way – if you are lucky – but what you actually want is traffic that stays. That won’t bounce off.
Work to get traffic from blogs that you regularly go to, blogs in your niche, not matter how small. Because this is high quality traffic, interested in the same things as you are.
Few hundred engaged readers are way better than thousands and thousands of visitors to your site. These are the ones who are genuinely interested in you, your content and go on to develop a sense of connection with you.
These are the people you are looking for.
Don’t worry if you have few hundred readers, and you can’t write every day. Have fun, learn along the way and make friends with other bloggers. Focus on content as well as other areas and stop driving yourself insane with the question – is my content good enough?
And you will be fine.
About the Author: Marya is a passionate writer, blogger and a thinker. When she is not writing online, she is found mimicking the properties of a bookworm, or enjoying delicious food – cooked by able restaurant people. Catch more of her posts at Writing Happiness. Stalk her on twitter – she is very friendly.
Original Post: 4 Biggest Blogging Myths That Lead to Bloggers Giving Up
How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
This is a guest post by Danny Wong. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Writing hasn’t always been a skill of mine. I rarely ever read when I was younger, and still had my father read me books for years after I had learned how to read for myself.
So how did I go from a forced writer (I only wrote things when I had to for school and never for recreation) to an influential blogger?
I started writing for our business blog just because we needed content creators. I was new to this whole Social Media thing, and I could hardly write coherent content, nevertheless quality content. I dreaded it.
We quickly killed my future contributions to the blog because I wasn’t enjoying it, the content wasn’t incredibly beneficial or engaging, and instead I focused more efforts on things I could do to really impact the business.
So I turned to learning how to manage Public Relations because I thought, “If I can’t inbound any visitors to the site and business blog by writing quality content, then let me go out and get traffic from other people’s sites and blogs.”
So I spent a lot of time schmoozing bloggers and writers and then I closed a feature article with a writer on a site called Examiner.com. I thought it was the neatest thing to have such a high traffic site featuring me since it had millions of unique visitors a month. After reading and reveling in the feature article, I saw a Call-To-Action saying, “Write for us” and I thought, “Hm. This seems like an interesting opportunity to build brand awareness through links in my byline and increase my personal brand by just being a (sort of) professional writer.”
The CTA called to me and I answered. Using a referral from the writer that featured me, I ended up becoming the Boston Startup Examiner, and then things just snowballed from there. I starting reading blogs like DailyBlogTips, reading more content on Examiner and other news-oriented blogs, and then starting doing guest posts any blogs that would take my work!
Then I just kept stumbling upon opportunities, and quickly built relationships with lots of editors through my formal PR work and then reached out to them with a guest post ready for their review.
Finally, I started publishing on some of the biggest sites in their niche, like SearchEngineJournal and a local NY Times blog, and then I started publishing on some of the biggest blogs in the world like TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
Now, I have a blogger account with the world’s #1 blog, HuffingtonPost, and I have a pretty strong portfolio of writings published in an even stronger set of blogs, which gives me leverage when trying to publish articles on other sites when I can say, “My name is Danny Wong and I have contributed writings to NY Times (blog), HuffingtonPost, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and Examiner.”
Just to break down how I went from sucking at writing to writing for some of the world’s biggest blogs:
1. I had a relationship with a writer at a media outlet that had open invitations for writers to join, and spent way too many hours crafting my application writings as well as my first few posts.
2. I was reading more blogs and books, and spent more time writing blog posts that I would never publish just for the sake of practicing writing.
3. I started publishing anywhere and everywhere that would talk to a small-time writer like me, especially one that had some interesting thoughts and experience in startups and entrepreneurship.
4. Some of the bigger blogs I read had published guest posts on their site, so I contacted the first person I knew who was a writer (a relationship I built through my PR work) and asked how I might become a contributor. Sometimes, I was directed to the editor who would then request I submit a post to them directly, or I would have already had contact with an editor who was anxious to see how I could contribute to their business.
5. The bigger sites bit. Admittedly, I did spend several hours writing my first post for each outlet, but it was well worth the time investment because I started the relationship off on the right foot, and then became a semi-frequent contributor.
6. I name-dropped all the different media outlets I had contributed to when pitching myself to publish with a new media outlet, so things just snowballed as I built up my credibility. As I became more credible after publishing posts with more and more influential blogs, the bigger blogs started to pay attention to me and were more than happy to take my contributions.
It took quite a bit of hard work, networking and determination to build up my writing skills and my writing portfolio so now I can proudly say I am a blogger with the #1 blog in the world and write for several of the biggest blogs out there.
What tactics did you use to publish with big blogs and sites?
About the author: Danny Wong is a writer at HuffingtonPost (you can see his column here), the #1 blog in the world, and the co-founder of co-created dress shirts startup, Blank Label.
Original Post: How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?
I’m preparing a presentation on ‘Finding Readers for your Blog’ which I’ll be giving at the Melbourne Blog Training Day next Tuesday.
It’s got me thinking back to some of the bigger days of traffic that I’ve had on my own blogs over the years and I thought I’d open up some discussion on the topic to see if we can identify any trends.
What was your biggest day of Traffic (or ‘days’ if you can think of more than one) and what happened to make them occur?
I asked this on Twitter yesterday and it was interesting to see the responses. Some of the reasons giving included:
- controversial posts
- creative posts
- random links from bigger sites
- social bookmarking events (getting popular on Digg or Delicious)
- ranking high for terms in Google around big news events
- breaking a scoop news story
I’m sure we’ll see some of these themes in your experiences but know that there will be other themes too.
For me there have been many bigger than normal days over the last 8 years. Two that spring to mind include:
- My Six Figure Blogging Moment – I had been blogging for a while and suddenly realised that I was on track for over 0,000 in a year earnings from my blogs. The first time I mentioned it was in an interview that I did. I didn’t really think about the implications of talking about it at the time but that interview went viral – as did my followup post. What kicked it all off was a mention on Slashdot (which at the time was equivalent to getting on the front page of Digg).
- Front page of Yahoo (sort of) – then there was the day that a post on my photography blog was featured by one of Yahoo’s tech blogs. That in itself didn’t sent much traffic but when that particular Yahoo blog’s post was featured on the front page of Yahoo for 4-5 hours one day I saw traffic hit my blog like I’ve never seen traffic before or since. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I saw more traffic from that 4-5 hours than I’d normally see in a week of traffic.
So now it’s over to you. What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day and Why did it Happen?
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
What Was Your Biggest Traffic Day?