Well I couldn't resist it so I created a new personal blog. Why not give it a visit too. Find Gary's personal blog here

Go on over to Rant-Here - its funny as hell....

And here is another great blog focused on making and saving money. What I like about this one is that it talks about saving money as well as making money and it covers pretty much every topic you could imagine or want to know about. For example, he talks about gas prices in California but with an emphasis on how to spen less money on gasoline.

The site is full of good articles but it is a little heavy on the ads. Nontheless, I like looking at sites like this for ideas and also to see what money making schemes are being utilized. He plainly uses google and adbrite but also a number of affiliate programs to based on the advertising on the site. Go check it out....

If you enjoy sport - American sports - then I discovered a blog and website that might be for you. It's called Brutus Report. It's actually packed with features like whiteboards, discussion forums, a blog, news feeds and much much more. In fact, it even has a photo gallery and an online store featuring collectibles!

The main focus of the site is Ohio State Football and Buckeye Sports from the coaches, recruits, and players but it does feature a lot more than that... check it out.

People blog about all sorts of things and all sorts of topics but this blog was a new one for me and very creative. A third-year student is blogging about his aim at escaping debt! Of course, he is also using the blog to make a few dollars and why not? Looking at his P and L he needs those few extra dollars. Besides, I wish my student son would follow suit.

Go on over and check out the blog Invesing My Way to Financial Freedom and follow his trials and tribulations as he attempts to get summer jobs and make ends meet....

Well, here is another blog with some good content particularly if you use the Blogger platform since it has a lot of posts regarding using that platform more effectively. Though why it is called Third World Chaos is beyond me...sounds good though!

Its a well laid out blog with some excellent posts including this one about a service called Blogatiser. This is one I will be reviewing to see how it works and if it might work for my blogs too.

The site is multi lingual too which is a nice touch - check it out...

Here is a blog you should all check out particularly if you enjoy novels, stories and so on. Before I am Famous is written by a Mom who fancies herself as a writer. When I say fancies herself as a writer I should say is a writer and a prolific one at that. She wants to be a professional writer is what I actually mean.

First off, she blogs and blogs with multiple entries a day. A prolific blogger in fact. Secondly, her site is full of stories and complete novels! As an example, check out Firefly. It's a complete book on line. Great writer too....

Suggestion for the blogger is to self-publish something and promote it. These days it is no shame to self publish and you can even use the Amazon affiliate - Booksurge. It's quite cheap to do, you still make good royalties and the book is listed on Amazon.com. How do know? Because two of my six published books were put out using that method.

Anyway - it's a truly great blog and a must visit....

The Internet is a bit like the Wild West - it's full of pioneers - modern day entrepreneurs trying to build businesses. The problem though is that like the Gold Rush, there are often simply too many chasing too few opportunities so it truly takes an entrepreneur to be successful.

Ok - I am plugging my other blog here so do bear with me a bit. Rant-here.com is a very funny blog. It covers all sorts of topics but includes videos, pictures, rants and more - even humorous articles about architecture.

Why not stop by for a smile and even submit your own rant at the site?

I have just used sponsoredreviews to promote my other blog. It is interesting seeing how this service works as an advertiser rather than as a blogger. However, I spent $50 on 7 reviews of my blog.

The reviews were not brilliant. The sites that I chose (200 bloggers bid on my campaign) were a mixed bunch but despite the quality of some reviews being poor the overall results were very good. My blog jumped 200,000 on Technorati based on the 7 reviews which is pretty damn good. It now has a 411,000 rank.

Selecting bloggers wasn't much fun. 200 applicants to go through and despite some good information on sponsoredreviews.com, I still had to visit each site to take a peek at the blog that would host my review. Despite that, again, this was a successful exercise and I intend to spend another $50 immediately.

If you want to do the same - just click the link below.

Starting a blog is very easy. There are tons of services where you can simply start a blog - many for free. It's what comes next that isn't easy.

A blog is like a baby. It needs feeding all of the time. You have to write content and build a library of article that hopefully interests somebody. That takes time but it takes creativity too - what to write about everyday? Sometimes you just run out of ideas for an article.

Fine, so you are writing but is anyone reading? Promoting your blog will take a lot of time too and creativity. Frankly, its a crowded space with millions and millions of competitors - so what's your plan to attract some readers over to your blog?

Even when readers come the next step is how to keep them coming back? How to grow the number of readers that visit your website each day?

It's tough running a blog especially if you think you want to make money out of it. Money only comes with traffic and traffic is hard to get.

I was running through my web stats the other day paying attention to where hits where originating and found several from a thing called keywordspy. With a name like that I decided to go over and see what it actually was.

What I found was a service that helps you discover what keywords your competitors are using. Here is what the site says about its service..."There are more than 1 billion keywords searched every month by users around the world. Finding the correct ones for your website is not an easy task. Hundreds of hours must be spent in searching for the right keywords for one ad campaign.

Your competitors know best, why not let them do all the hard work by spending time and money on keywords you in turn will use for your ad campaign. With just a few clicks you can create a large targeted keyword campaign. Only use keywords that are proven to generate sales and save money.

Companies with a much larger list of keywords drive more traffic to their sites compared to those who have less. KeywordSpy helps drive traffic from competing sites to your own instantly, resulting in optimum exposure at the least amount of time and costs."

If you are like me, you struggle trying to find ways to increase inbound links to your blog or website. But now Smorty.com has come up with a really good idea. It's called post exchange.

Smorty is a service that matches advertisers with bloggers. Bloggers get paid to write a post about an advertiser. But now they are offering a new service for bloggers. If you are a Smorty blogger then you can join in too.

How it works is that Smorty selects a bloggers blog and has you write a 150 word post about it. Using their approval system used for paid blogging, you get rated for your post and so forth. Your blog is then eligible to have a post written about it by another Smorty blogger. Free back links!

This is a great idea on Smorty's part. It adds something of value for bloggers to an already very good service. Bloggers can get backlinks to their blogs and all done using the same system that Smorty uses for paid posts.... nice work!

I have just completed a study for my employer on blogs in energy and natural resources. It was an eye opener. Firstly, I didn't know that there were 112 million blogs growing at 175,000 per day - did you?. That simply means that getting traffic to your blog is very competitive these days and every day is a battle in the blogging marketing war.

Some of the other findings were quite surprising too. Among the energy and utility company professionals surveyed, about one third use blogs as sources of information and about one third of them state that blogs play a role in their daily decision making. For a conservative and staid industry like energy and utilities, that's amazing.

Read anyones advice about blog promotion and will contain two bullet points for sure out of however many points they have. These will be comment on other peoples blogs and submit articles to social networking sites like Digg.

Funny because I have never found either to work well.

If you are a member of a social networking site and have lots of friends on that site then submitting articles might work for you and on Digg a published article will get an awful lot of reads. But... if you just go to social networking sites and submit articles don't expect anything to happen.

Social networking sites are just that - SOCIAL - this means you need to already be a player in the community and have lots of friends who will digg your stuff. If not, I promise you your articles will get one Digg - yours - and then fade into obscurity.

Blogging is like being at war. But you are at war with a silent and unknown enemy - other bloggers. There are literally millions of blogs and websites and yet we have some strange faith that we can attract readers to our blogs. Ask yourself this question - Why would anyone visit your site? Indeed, an even better question might be - Why would they ever return?

It really is all about marketing and marketing is war.

The Daily Battle
Each day or so, we post something to our blogs and then set about either sitting back and hoping or we engage in some marketing. But who are you marketing to? What makes your post so compelling that someone will decide to visit your blog, read your article and not someone else's? It's our daily battle in an everlasting war for readers, reader loyalty and revenues.