I am really amazed at how many people put so much of their time and work on a free hosted service, mainly free hosted blogging services, such as Blogger and Worpdress.

Well, you know my experience with Wordpress (no hard feelings).

I am not saying these services do not have their uses. I will be the first one to say Blogger blogs have sent me traffic and I know they are a boost when it comes to link backs. They do come in handy.

Problem is, you put in all this work into your free hosted blog, slaving over the content to get it just right, building up readership, and one day… it’s gone. For some reason, doesn’t really matter, they decided your blog needed to be deleted. Believe you me, it happens.

Perfect example: I was on MyBlogLog account, working on adding friends. Before I add a friend, I always like to check out their sites, see what they are about and more importantly, to see they are in the same type of business. I stopped by one marketers site today and clicked on the first site is his list, happened to be a blogger blog of his, and what did I get?

“Blogger: Blog not found”

i have no idea why and it really doesn’t matter, it was gone and actually anyone could now register the blog. From what I saw, it looked like he put some work into it, a shame really.

For me it also comes down to business. Maybe I’m odd, but I find it hard to take any one seriously, when they’re using free hosted anything. I’m not trying to be rude, but if some one can’t put up a few bucks for hosting, how serious can they be about their business? I realize many people are on a tight budget, been there many times myself, but I don’t personally buy the excuse.

These days hosting is dirt cheap, so much so, any one can afford it. Honestly if some one can not scrap up a few bucks a month, they probably shouldn’t be online in the first place. Seriously, it takes money to make money, yes… even on the Internet.

By all means, use the free services for getting traffic and link backs, but it doesn’t make much sense to trust your important business content on a blog that could be gone tomorrow. Right?

Okay, enough of my ranting today. I’m sure I’ll think of something else to rant about tomorrow..:)

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Found out the other day, three of my Wordpress-Hosting blogs were suspended. I believe it was because they were too promotional. I am not upset with the service, it’s their service and their rules. They sure provide a great service and make some incredible free blogging software. I think I’d also say my hats off to them for creating a space, that is not all marketing, all the time.

I thought I posted some good content, with only 2-3 links per post. I am guessing my RSS feed in the side bar for my store was a little too much. I see many other blogs that have links, so can’t see how my lnks were the reason for my penalty. I’ve heard rumors, they did not like marketing, guess I proved the rumor.

Anyways, here’s another chance to learn from me, how I learned the hard way and avoid the mistakes I make. This is also very important to show, never put your important work anywhere that you do not have total control, it could all disappear into cyber space at any time.

Second lesson would be, don’t over market all the time. Some times just getting a link is all you can get, and that’s often good enough.

So, did you learn anything?

Any one else get their Worpdress blogs knocked off the net?

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I try helping people, usually on forums, how to SEO their blogs, but few seem to get it or listen, or they seem to blow off what I say.

First off, I am not claiming to be some SEO Guru, I am always learning. Even so I do pretty good, I’ve had sites getting over 20k uniques a day in a pretty competitive niche.

So for those that want to listen and at least try their hand…

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I was reading a blog today, had an interesting post I was going to comment on. I will out the comment section, clicked submit and “You need to be logged into Comment”. Okay…

First it was odd that the form was wide open, usually it will say you need to register to comment. Even still there was no remark that registration was needed.

So I didn’t comment. I didn’t feel like going through the process. You could call it being lazy. I didn’t want to spend the time to fill out the form, then I might have to confirm, ect. Too much hassle.

I can’t say i was lost as a reader, or this blog will lose other readers because of the comments set-up, but I don’t know if I’ll be back. A powerful tactic of any blog is the power of comments and building a community, creating some interaction.

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I talked about it not long ago and finally took action, stepped up to the plate and installed a new theme.

What do you think? Good? Bad?

I am terrible when it comes to looking for a new theme, I get a layout stuck in my head and find myself searching till I find it. Well, usually not exactly what I had i n mind, but real close.

Now Hopefully, i won’t see this one being used everywhere. I’d love to create my own, but I don’t have the time and I am not a CSS expert. I can do the little things, like changing colors, fonts and alignment, but when it comes to layout or the frame work, I am lost. I even bought a couple books that could probably teach me, but they are a low priority on my reading list, which seems ever growing and never-ending.

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When I first found the theme for this blog, seemed it was perfect, just what I was looking for.

Since then I see more and more bloggers using this exact same theme. Of course it’s a free public theme, any one is welcome to use it. But I don’t want my blog to look like any one else’s. I wouldn’t be unique.

So… I guess it’s time to hunt up another theme or change this one enough to be different. I could also find a new one and change it as well.

Has any one else seen this same theme in use on other blogs?

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If your not sure what I mean when I use the term, Bookmark traffic, it simple means, surfers who have bookmarked or saved your sites address, so they can easily find their way back to your website. Just like marking a page your reading in a paperback.

It stands to reason, if people have gone to the trouble of bookmarking your site, it’s most likely you got their attention and they are interested in what you have to say.

As the saying goes, it’s much less work to keep a customer than it is to find new ones.

We also know not every person will buy the first time they see your offer(s).

So on with the tips….

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Seems recently there is talk about turning off comments on a blog. The reasons seem quite valid.

It’s probably not what your thinking, it’s not just because of comment spam, though thats a pretty good reason and part of the discussion. The reason is more to keep the blog focused on the main theme, such as internet marketing. Often comments can be just lame attempts at marketing or traffic generation for another site.. Not to mention, some on the edge of abusive or name calling, etc.

While I don’t really disagree, it has it merits, but four things come to my mind.

First and foremost, if your going to have your trackbacks on, you better have some security. Comment spam is only on part of the problem from spammers, trackback spam is just as bad if not worst. When I first started blogging some time back, I made the mistake of having comments and trackbacks wide open. We all learn the hard way don’t we? Long story short, I was slammed with 100’s if not 1,000’s of trackback spams. Of course you can turn them off and use plug-ins to block, but the bad thing is they continue to show up in your stats as traffic, making it quite the mess. Amazingly even after blocking them, they still hit your site day in and day out. Only solution is to try contact those sites and get them to stop pinging your sites. Pretty bad when WE have to track THEM down to stop them from doing what they should’nt have been doing in the first place.

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If you’ve got a blog, it’s like any other website. You want surfers to remember your site and come back. The best way is to get them back is to have them bookmark your site. With a blog it can get even better, you persuade them to add your feed. You’ve probably seen those little icons like “add to google” or “my yahoo”. Those little graphics are referred to as chicklet. See, it even has a cute name.. aawww

A great tool I found is the Chicklet Creator and it does the work for you. You simply add your blog title, blog url and blog feed url, a few clicks and you have copy and paste code. Put it in your blog and your ready to go. There is no need to even download all the little graphics, but I personally do and host them myself. If you host the images yourself, you don’t have to worry about any of those sites bogging down and slowing your site down, waiting for the image to load.

And the chicklets make your site look so shiny, new and hip, even on the Web 2.0 side.

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