How to Find Your Writing Niche – Even in a Saturated Market

When I first started blogging, I made a huge list of topics I knew quite a bit about and could help others with.

How to Back up Your Social Media Accounts

If you are like me, you have all your major working materials stored online: I organize useful links with Google bookmarks and Delicious, store email and IM conversation with Gmail, have most of my important (collaboration) docs at Google Docs, have multiple resource collections on Wordpress and Blogger, etc. Backing up this massive amount if highly important information is actually a smart idea because the services are not owned by me, hosted by God knows who and thus having a local copy and updating it regularly would be wise. Backupify is a nice (free until January 31) web-based tool that allows to download content from a number of popular online services including: Gmail Twitter Google Docs Flickr Facebook Basecamp Wordpress Delicious Photobucket Blogger FriendFeed Here’s how it works: after signing up you will be offered the list of social media sites “to manage”: Here are a few examples : Allow the tool to access your Twitter account by Twitter auth; Login to Delicious using your login information; Connect to Flickr account by Flickr auth; Connect to Photobucket account by Photobucket auth, etc When you are done adding your social media accounts, set up the back-up frequency (daily or weekly) and delivery options: Email me every time a backup is performed Email me a once daily digest of all backup activity Email me a once weekly digest of all backup activity Do not notify me via email of any backups You can also access the archives of your backups at Backupify from any computer. The only possible excuse for not trying the tool out is the privacy concerns, here’s an extract from the service privacy policy (remember: your privacy is up to you): What information is collected about me? We only collect data you provide us at sign-up. We do not ask for any other personal information. We do not collect data without your knowledge. How do you use collected information? We don’t use it at all. The only thing we collect and monitor is general patterns of storage and service usage so that we can make sure our architecture is optimized for speed and scalability. What security measures do you use to protect my privacy? Any information we have about you is stored with strong encryption. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Back up Your Social Media

Business Opportunities for Artists at Home

by Ethan O. Tanner Everybody admits the stereotype of the famishing artist? Fortunatly, that sterotype may in short become a issue from the past. The web has yielded good chances for imaginative people. Now, you have a platform to share your creative efforts with the rest of the world. You can take advantage of the different at home business opportunities available to artists. In the past, you had to find a gallery or showroom and convince them to display your work. Maybe you even tried setting up your easel in a local park or on the sidewalk and selling your work that way. With the Internet, some new at home business opportunities have opened up for you. You can set up your own personal web site which will serve as your own digital art gallery. Whenever you produce afresh work, you are able to easily add a digital picture of the item to the internet site. By adding a shopping cart to your internet site, you are able to sell your artwork yourself without being forced to employ a wholesaler. IShould you already have a faithful following for your art, you are able to research different at home business chances. You could try selling your artwork on a few of the World Wide Web auction internet sites. If you have prints or many replicates of your artwork, you may prefer to offer an associate program of your own and enlist people to sell these artworks for you. To fune you whilst you’re awaiting to turn a prospering creative person, you can test another home base job chances. You may look into the possibility of merchandising art-related products as an affiliate seller. Assemble your own internet site that sells products such as posters, various artistry prints, stationery items and art supplies. Alternately, you could publish a blog or World Wide Web newsletter and write reviews of artists, art shows and unlike products associated with your field of art. Try something nontraditional in the way of at home business opportunities so that you can fund your artistic endeavors. In this way, you can experience your true passion while supporting yourself without leaving home. About the Author: Artist Ethan O. Tanner shares his knowledge regarding Internet Marketing for your art pieces and explains Home Business selling possibilites.

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Business Opportunities for Artists at Home

Article Marketing: Unique Articles Only

by Dirk Andersen Do you want to get more traffic into your sites? Well, a good way to do that is by embedding back links to your pages in articles that you write and submit to various online sites. Before you get too excited, you need to realize that this approach works spectacularly when done intelligently. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but you will have to spend a great deal of time writing up and submitting your articles to the multitude of accessible article directories and e-zine lists. A good piece of this burden can be relieved if you use an article marketing submission tool, which can be had, gratis or for a fee, from online sources. Write an article with a high degree of quality in mind, and use all the knowledge you have accumulated about search engine optimization strategies to come up with a set of keywords that will effectively represent your particular bailiwick — and don’t forget that you want your article to be viewed as a rich resource for other authors. Once you have the article edited to your satisfaction, then insert the text into your article marketing tool, and launch it away Is there a problem with this? Oh, yes. If you submit the same exact article text to every existing article directory site, you may not get the plethora of back links you were expecting to get. The top search engines are designed to detect duplication of content and to back link only the “original”. The Solution: Continue to submit articles regularly. But don’t submit any single unique article more than once. That way you avoid duplication, and you are assured of getting a back link to your website in all your articles. If you can manage to publish at least one article each week, then over a few years, you will accumulate hundreds, possibly thousands of back links to your venues. Alright! Now, you are champing at the bit to write those articles and begin to reap the rewards of increased traffic through your website. And, well you should. Just the same, you need to keep some perspective. First of all, you are liable to wait a long time before you see any uptick in your traffic. Secondly, for those who have had some experience with this approach, you may remember it working well for you then gradually tapering off in its effectiveness. Let’s face it: the Web changes how it operates over time, and such changes can affect a lot of things, even your particular back link strategy. About the Author: If you want to explode your traffic and really start moving up in Google then you need article submission on your site. Click the link to see an extrodinary tool.

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Article Marketing: Unique Articles Only

International SEO: Need Your Help

Ok, so the past couple of months I have been researching international (or global) SEO and best practices that go along with it.  For the most part I have found few resources, so I figured I would give you some best practices that are probably beginner level along with some links from Michael Gray , who was kind enough to share his knowledge when I ran into him at IZEAfest . Below are the tips, but what I really want is YOUR input and assisting me and others who are running into the same issues with finding REALLY good resources regarding best practices for international search engine optimization .  Please leave comments and links so we can all share the wealth and gain a better knowledge of narrowing the gap when it comes to global search engine optimization. Cheers, Victoria @tallchickvic International SEO