Are You Looking For Blog Tools

When you are ready to upgrade to a hosted blog and you choose Word Press there are some things you will need to know about.  The first thing is getting good web hosting.  Look for a host that has 24/7 support.  Call support or go online to see how long it takes for them to respond to you before you order the hosting.

You should not have to pay more then 10.00 a month to start out for a single domain hosted.  Some companies with give you discounts on your domain name when you sign up for hosting.  Most of the good hosting companies already have Word Press set up so it is really easy to install it.  They more or less walk you through it all step by step and you are up in running in a minimal amount of time.

wordpress.org has blogs and a lot of support there.  Do not be afraid to write to them for help. I had to do that today and got an answer so fast that it really surprised me.  I was not expecting anything so fast.  They sent me in the right direction to get the help I needed and that was awesome.

There are definite advantages to hosting your own blog.  You get to run ads on it and that is great if you want to do affiliate marketing or if you have your own product.

Today.com is great until you get to that point.  I really enjoy posting here.   However I run blogs that I host myself, too.  This way I get more experience and I am never ever wondering what to do.  There is always something I can do with so many blogs to post on.

If you are promoting business on the web, then you should think about social networking.  It first started in chat rooms (maybe I am wrong on this one), or maybe on discussion boards.  Does anyone remember the discussion boards?  There would be an article and then you would be allowed to enter your comments. There was lots of name calling and rude people on some of those.

Chat rooms were always fun and AOL did a fantastic job making a huge social site before the term Social Networking was even expanded upon.  Were you ever in those chat rooms and somehow a series of links would invade the room.  I am still not sure how they did that.  Someone said it was hacker/spammers.  That programming is beyond me.

Now Social Networking as been accepted by those who are serious about their content on the Internet.  However most social networking sites frown upon self promotion but others are all about self promotion. 

What are you looking for? Are you looking for finding your “soul mate”?  Well then you want to find a social site that is geared towards that.  However there is a lot of flirting that can happen on any social site, but you can find serious net marketers on these sites, too.  They are promoting themselves but in a round about way.

They are giving time to promoting others, and it comes back to helping promote them, too.  I am going to be following Social Networking on this blog and on some of my other blogs, too.  If you are serious about eventually doing some marketing on the Internet you should think about getting accounts at some of the Social Sites.

Digg is already a major player.  Today.com, this site has a unique format and will be one to watch.  Stay tuned for more about this.

It seems that I am caught up in the world of social networking right now.  Sites like this at Today.com have a community type of atmosphere if you have teh time to take advantage of it and see who you will meet.

How should you best spend your time on social sites?  Are they necessary?  Lets see I will answer the last first.  Yes I believe that the social sites are necessary for a few reasons, and that will take me to the first question.

Determine why you are on the social site.  You are pubishing content and you want it to be seen.  The social site will let you announce what you do to people who might be interested in seeing your content.

Suppose you write about quilt patterns.  Do you think that someone who is into knitting, crocheting, and sewing might be interested in seeing your content?  What about interior decorators, or home owners.  Maybe they are interested to see what you are doing.

You would want to find other quilters, too.  Where you visit leave comments and ask that they stop by and look at what you are doing, too.  Over time you will form a friendship and that is always fun.

You can choose to stick with your niche to start, or visit something of interest.  Where ever you visit, leave a comment.  Bloggers thrive on comments.  We love to get them.  Remember to leave them, too!  Be open, be honest, be friendly.  Do not leave a comment selling though.  That is considered spam and will most likely get rejected.

I cannot believe how time is flying.  I have been consumed with visiting some Social Networking sites.  I have visited seveal for years now off and on, not really finding what is working for me. 

I found some good communities if you would enjoy testing them out.  I will continually post and review them.  If you are looking for a way to make some friends online then this is worth checking out.

I do not endorse using these sorts of sites if you are looking for a romantic relationship.  Maybe they do work for some people but I had to give my opinion on that matter.  Be careful who you exchange personal information with and parents please do monitor what your children are doing when they are on the internet.

There that being said, on with the show.  I am a part of the ZenZuu Community.  Right  now it is free to join and I think it might be going to a paid community.  They are going to have a launch in August or September of this year.  It is definitely an international community.

The exciting thing about ZenZuu is that it is going to pay members for just being there.  So if you want to check it out you should do so before they change the way they do business.  They are still in Beta Testing so it can run slow and have some bugs.  It is safe browsing though.

A lot of people want to sell you things on that site.  You make friends and then see what they are about and then decided if you want to remain friends or not.  You can always delete your “friends”.

Try out ZenZuu by clicking on the Banner. Look for me when you do: Rocque

I have found other great sites, too, and will add them. However ZenZuu is one that pays you to belong (or will pay you in the future…not yet).

I found out about Internet Week in New York from Associated Content’s call to action for submitting content.  I submitted an entry and hopefully it will get accepted and I will win $5000.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Of course it would.

Here is the entry I did not submit to them.  Just some random thoughts about how having New York host an Internet Week could impact web users.

What do you think of when you hear the words, Internet Week In New York?  Is it going to be some huge party where everyone walks around with phones sticking out of their ears pulling carts containing their laptops behind them?  I can just see all the techies gathering at Central Park for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs teaming up for a duet of the famous song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, sung in Karaoke style.

Maybe I am a bit off the wall here, but just what does it mean when the Big Apple dedicates a whole week to the Internet?  What sort of credibility does that give the Internet?  Why did it take so long for New York to have Internet Week?  Or is this something I have not heard of before now?  To me the internet has always been credible.  I won’t bombard you with facts, because this is not a research or scientific article.  This is about my reaction to Internet Week in New York and how I foresee the changes that will take place after this event.

The Internet allows people to sit around in their pajamas to research, or play, or conduct business from home.  That is one of the personas.  Another one is that people who are antisocial hang out on the Internet avoiding facing people up front.  It is easier for some to gain acceptance on the Internet then it is in person.  You can find people with really poor social skills on the Internet.  Events such as Internet Week in New York are going to change that.  People are going to come out of the “I’m a geek, or a dork”, closet and be mainstreamed. Will New York hosting of a Geek Fest result in geek tolerance?  Wouldn’t that be cool?

There are many seasoned geeks who see no need to hide the fact we find this all amusing and entertaining.  At the same time it will be fun to see how the Internet evolves after such a week.  I predict that the social sites will boom after Geek Fest in New York.  I also predict that the need for live interactive coaching that teaches how to use the Internet is going to grow in demand.

That is why I am ahead of the trend and an Internet success coach with the Mastermind Pros team.  We do have our own website and we do have live interactive coaching sessions seven days a week.  I feel that after Internet Week and the publicity, more and more people are going to become interested in actual interaction where it goes beyond typing and the use of online conferencing is going to boom.

Thank you New York for the opportunities you are going to present for several hundreds, if not thousands of people, by hosting Internet Week.  The Internet world will never be the same after your event.

Did you hear that Word Press celebrated their 5th birthday? Thank you Word Press for all the blogs you have let me create and all the fun I have using your blogs, not to mention a few extra dollars I have made from the blogs.

I have recently been upgrading some of my older blogs to the WP 2.5.1  and I hope they do not throw out another upgrade in the near future or I will be sad.  However I have learned a whole lot with this recent upgrade.

For some reason my FTP client was running way too slow.  I just thought I had a lot of data since I posted a lot to that blog.  Wow, was I wrong.  I had so many problems with that update.  The template kept reverting back to the Kubrick template, and that did not work with all my widgets.  It was a mess.  Plus some of my posts that used php were showing errors.  This was a bloggers nightmare.

Luckily I have friends who know way more about behind the scenes technical blogging than I know right now, and they gave me some pointers.  I deleted everything but my content folder after making a backup of my database and my blog.  I just finished re-installing the blog with the Word Press 2.5.1 version and am taking a break to post this before I go finish the process.

In my next post I will tell you about a friend of mine who is a blogging genius, and who helps me a lot.  However for now if you want to go check to see what is happening with the Word Press birthday party then go to this site.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/05/birthday-party/

It was in San Francisco and it must have been fun.  One day when I am independently wealthy I will go attend one.  Maybe the 10th birthday party.