Should you pay for twitter followers? Some say yes, others say no. There are posts on how to tell if followers are real or fake. But how can you really know?
So do me a favor. I am doing a little Twitter test. If you came to this post because you were following a tweet, please let me know in the comments. I would really appreciate it. Include your Twitter user name and I will follow you as a real live person and retweet one of your tweets!

And if I get 20 legit comments on this old blog, one lucky commenter will get a Fiverr gift certificate. That way you can choose whichever SEO tool you would like to use. You can buy yourself some followers, get a logo designed, or pretty much whatever you want.
And if you don’t already, please follow @weirdtrep on twitter.

Thanks so much for your help!

After many years we are making changes to our blog. In the upcoming posts we will be focusing on how to market your business on the web. Today every business needs a web presence, and we will highlight the best ways for your business to stand out and be found by your potential clients.

I have been hanging out and posting at BlogEngage for a few years now and I think it is a really great site. Now Brian is offering a service that will promote your blog without any work on your part!

Here’s Brian…
We all want to market and promote our blogs but truth be told it’s too time consuming. The Blog Engage RSS Syndication Subscription Service allows you to take advantage of their amazing blogging community by submitting your blogs content on a daily basis.

Blog Engage has a total of four different memberships to join that will meet the needs of almost all of their members.

What’s Included with the service?

1. Automatic syndication of your blogs content.
2. Automatic submission of all future blog articles.
3. Automatically fills in the title, description and tags.
4. Automatic hourly or daily updates searching for your blogs new content.
5. Automatically submit one or multiple articles per RSS Feed Update.
6. One free vote with all RSS Feed article submissions.

SEO Benefits:

1. Automatically create do follow backlinks for every article you write.
2. Increase your SERP on all Search Engines.
3. Grow your reader base with our real community members.

I think one of the coolest features is you cannot tell the difference between a member that is part of the service or a member that manually submitting their content to the community.

Platinum Membership

Platinum Membership will allow you to have up tp three blogs and select up to five categories from each blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. We will also allow an unlimited amount of new articles to be submitted every hour your RSS feed is checked.

1. Add up to Three Seperate Blog url’s
2. RSS Feeds Checked Hourly
3. Unlimited New Articles Per Check
4. Five Categories to Update

Gold Membership

Gold Membership will allow you to select up to five categories from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. We will also allow an unlimited amount of new articles to be submitted every hour your RSS feed is checked.

1. RSS Feeds Checked Hourly
2. Unlimited New Articles Per Check
3. Five Categories to Update

Silver Membership

Silver Membership will allow you to select up to three categories from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. These are actual categories you have on your blog. Three new articles are allowed every 3 hours the RSS feed is checked.

1. RSS Feeds Checked Every Three Hours
2. Three New Articles Accepted Per Check
3. Three Categories to Update

Bronze Membership

Bronze Membership will allow you to select one category from your blog in which articles will be submitted to on blog engage. With Bronze membership please make sure to select the most popular category on your blog for your one category choice. We will submit all your other blog content to our General Blogging Category. One new article is accepted every 8 hours when the RSS feed is checked

1. RSS Feeds Checked Every Eight Hours
2. Three New Articles Accepted Per Check
3. One Category to Update

Here is something a little off topic  from Edgardo Rosa

When you think of college football fans, you usually think of some diehard fans of an SEC school, where all of the teams are so good they are almost considered ‘semi-pro’, or maybe one of the cold weather teams where the uniforms are sparsely colored and the play on the field is nasty and knuckle-busting.

Truth be told, every year when I sit down to watch my favorite college football team on the channels that my cable tv offers, I’m not rooting for a traditional football powerhouse. I’m one of those fans who is left with rooting for a team that has had a lot of success in another sport…college basketball.

My team is the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Sure, you might think I’d realize that the chances of the Heels winning a major football bowl game are slim to none, but like a true fan, I would immediately bring up the fact that at one point, the Heels were ranked in the top five and considered a national power. Of course, that was years ago, before Mack Brown let to turn Texas back into a national champion. It was also before a string of follow up coaches took our team back to the land of single-dgit wins. Ah, well, a fan can dream, right? Maybe this year, finally, my team will get back on track.

I don’t usually use Ezine Articles for this blog. However, this post on Article Marketing was actually too good not to share.
~Kat~

By Jeff Herring

Article Marketing is the number one source of free traffic on the Internet if you get your Resource Box right. Get this one wrong and you have wasted all your time. Get this one right and you have got it made!

What a Resource Box really is

Call it a Resource Box, Author Bio, etc., what it really is is your opportunity to create a compelling call to action for your reader. Even though it is called an Author Bio, it is not the time for you to tell the reader all about you and convince them you are an expert. In fact, if you have not demonstrated that you are an expert in your article, it is way to late too try to do it now.

Even though it is an official Call to Action, I like to teach my students and members to use what I call “invitational language” in their Resource Box. Invitational language can be something as simple as “and now I would like to invite you to…” and then name the next action you would like them to take. This is as opposed to something like “get this great new product now and all your problems will be solved by morning and if you don’t you will be broke forever!”

Sure I’ve exaggerated a bit, but not by much.

Here’s how to do it

You want the Resource Box to flow right out of your article, since it is the next paragraph in the article. Starting off with “Jim Smith is blah blah blah” is like announcing to the reader that the article is over and they can stop reading now. Not the result you want at all, right?

Instead you can start off with a nice transitional phrase beginning with the word “and.” For example, “And now I would like to…” or “And now you can…” is a great way to begin.

Then, back to my notion of invitational language, you simply invite the reader to take the next action you want them to take. For example, you can say “And now you can claim your free instant access to…” whatever it is you are going to offer them. The invitational language brings them in instead of chasing them off.

Then and only then do I ever mention my name, and then only so that the good information they are about to get is linked in their mind to my name and brand.

Here is a complete example:

And now I would like to invite you to claim your FREE Instant Access to 2 of my Instant Article Creation Templates when you visit http://www.TheArticleGuyBonus.com

Click here to get two “plug-n-play” article templates – just plug in your info! And you will also get a 30 minute Audio Replay of a teleseminar about writing more articles in less time than you ever thought possible.

From Jeff Herring – The Article Marketing Guy and The Great Article Marketing Network.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeff_Herring

http://EzineArticles.com/?Your-Article-Resource-Box—The-Secret-to-Getting-the-Most-Traffic-From-Each-and-Every-Article&id=3624961

I love creating a new site. I like setting up the themes, adding new content, starting something fresh and new. All my old blogs suffer when I get the idea for something new. But then, I am in such a hurry to get the new site launched, that I skip some really basic checks.

I just read Smashing Magazine’s “15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website”, and it was a good reminder to me of all the really basic items you should check before doing a full launch of your website.

Sure some of the checks are pretty basic, like making sure that all your links work. Checking all your links can be a tedious, but necessary chore. You don’t want to frustrate your readers with links that go to nowhere, or worse, to an offensive site.

Another basic, and often overlooked check is proofreading for spelling and grammar. This one gets me all the time! Even though I have my spell checker on at all times… (there’s that squiggly red line again!) many mistakes still get by. Try reading your text backwards, or having someone else proofread for you.

Be sure to read the comments section on the article. There are more good suggestions there.

I know I am a little late to the party, but I have finally joined Twitter. I do think it will be a good way to promote my blogs. So of course the very first thing I wanted to get was a “follow me” badge for my blogs.
If you look over there on the right hand side of the blog I found a great one.
It is from GOTOWEB20 and it is a simple script that is very easy to customize. It took me all of two minutes to set up the badge and install it on my blog.

Now do me a favor and click that button so you can follow me on twitter, and then go to gotoweb20 and get your own!

Update: In the comments Brian pointed out you can code the button yourself without going to an outside source. You can get the code here at the BlogEngage Forum.

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. I never intended to infringe on anyone’s trademark. I am not sure that I have. But just last week I received a letter demanding that I stop using a domain that I own, (not this one) because the first five letters of my 12 letter domain name are trademarked.

The company is not a large company that anyone would have known about, the characters they claim as theirs alone are a common word and a common acronym. Most people would assume they are in the public domain, much the same as I am assuming that “Webmaster” and “Blog” are in the public domain. (If not I am going to get them trademarked as soon as I finish writing this.)

It just so happens that this is one of my most successful domains, and not because of the 5 trademarked characters. In fact, I had recently changed the name of the blog for better SEO. The blog name contains none of the trademarked characters, it is just the domain.

If I had the money to hire a lawyer I might have a decent chance of defending my claim to the domain. I mean seriously, 5 letters our of 12? The company claims that their customers have been confused and have thought that my blog is related to the company. I find that hard to believe.

Searching the internet I have found that generally there are two things you should do when you receive a cease and desist letter. The first is to take it seriously, the second is to hire an attorney.

But the reality is, I have no money to fight this. I will try and appeal to the company’s sense of fairness. Maybe I can receive some small compensation for the loss of income and hard work. But I doubt it. Because I lack the resources to defend my rights, they will be trampled.

I bring this up here, not because I am asking for money, but because I think there is a problem with the system, and I am not sure how it can be fixed. It does not seem right to me, that just because someone else is bigger and has more money than me, they can take what is mine and there is nothing I can do about it. I know this has happened to many people in much bigger ways. It is not like I am losing a major source of income, or my life’s work. Just my very first domain that made a little money from adsense and other ad sales.

So bloggers everywhere beware. And if you have any ideas about what can be done please let me know in the comments.

Dec. 16  AJ

Dec. 17 No Winner

Dec. 18  Mr. I

Dec. 19 No Winner

Dec.20 No Winner

Dec. 21 No winner

Dec. 22Twilla

Dec. 23 No winner

Dec. 24 No winner

Dec. 25  Grand Prize Winner! Escofiled

Thanks to everyone that commented.  Winners, check your email!

Yikes! The new theme doesn’t like the forum. I hope to have it fixed soon.

I have just found this new plugin that ads a forum to Word Press. It would be great if you could check it out and let me know what you think. It is certainly different than the Simple Machines Forums, VBulletin, or any others that you might be familar with.

Click here to visit the forum.

It is a work in progress, and I am just checking it out right now. So I welcome all your comments, critiques, and criticisms.

To register for the forum, you just need to register with the blog. Scroll down the page until you find the meta section in the sidebar. That is where you will find the link to register, both to this blog, and to the forum.

Thanks!