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Blog Piracy and Hostage Holding

Well now I have seen it all. I have a client for whom we do ghost blogging and he sent me a note yesterday asking if we could host his blog. It appears that his current blog host had charged $1,500 for blog set up, owned his domain name and blog template, and was charging a whopping $500 a month maintenance fee. On top of that he paid us ghost blogging charges.

It just does not have to cost this much to blog! Hosting for a WordPress blog with auto-publish features and full SEO fields (which I like very much) can be had for $3.39 a month at Go Daddy, blog set up and configuration with a nice free WordPress template can be done for under $199, and you can buy your domain name when you set up hosting with Go Daddy and even own it yourself for $1.99. Scary isn’t it the difference!

To be 100% truthful his original blog allowed new authors to create their own blog, but only two people on his blog was using that the rest were just publishing to the main blog. We have been able to set up a plain vanilla WordPress blog at the prices above and allow all of his previous authors to continue to write and categorize their blogs by their business name for easy navigation to their posts.

Blogging and blog set up simply does not have to be expensive and maintenance should never cost this much. If you are paying this much for YOUR blog, you need to contact us to find out how we can save you money and still get the search engine benefits you want.

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Links broken in Outlook

There is a very simple fix for this pesky problem when links for some reason stop being clickable in Outlook. Here are two things to try to resolve the problem when this happens to you.

1. Go to your start menu and select default programs. Set Internet Explorer as your default browser. You can do this by either clicking Microsoft or open up custom and then checking make Internet Explorer my default browser. Simple enough, but why do that to turn on links in OUTLOOK? It is simple Outlook is a Microsoft application and when a link is clicked in Outlook, Outlook cannot seem to find the connection of what application to open to use to view the link. Personally I have had this intermittent link problem when I have been using or updating Firefox on my computer. Microsoft just does not play nice with other applications.

2. In Outlook try right clicking on the message and then select Junk Mail and then click add sender to safe sender’s list. This will turn on links and images for that sender.

Both of these options may help you to get back in business when it comes to clicking links in Outlook. For those of you who just really want to use Firefox and not Outlook, well you can try making Firefox the default browser and see if you can click links in Outlook, but you may be using Thunderbird as your default mail program in that case.

Good luck and leave me a comment if you’ve found another way that you like better than mine to turn on links.

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Social Bookmarking the New SEO Plan?

I am very closely taking a look at social bookmarking this month and will be writing a piece and possibly a white paper on it this month. You can click my post title to subscribe to my e-newsletter which goes out once a month so you will be sure to have first review of the article.

Social bookmarking has been around for about two years or so but has really caught my eye this last year as a way to drive more website traffic and to create a viral component for new products and services. It is not a silver bullet for traffic and possibly even search engine placement, but it does hold strong consideration and review for use on all new websites.

Right now I am reviewing just how a site should use social bookmarking and how traffic can be driven to a site. I am evaluating Digg and Del.icio.us – (gosh that is a hard name to remember where to put the periods) and will be reviewing numerous others as well. If you have a comment or a social bookmarking site that you like, just click comments and let me know in the meantime. I have embedded a YouTube video that I thought was particularly well done that very clearly explains social bookmarking using Del.icio.us as an example.

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Image Copyrights – Don’t Get Sued

I read about a young woman today in the Washington Post who had posted her picture with a friend on Yahoo’s Flickr. The photo was in turn used by Virgin in a text messaging ad without her consent. Her friend was cropped out, but clearly her image was used. Well that’s a law suit right there! The parents say that they are suing.

I have blogged about this before, but it needs repeating – Everything on the Web is copyrighted by someone! You can not just right click a picture and use it on a commercial website. In some cases you can use images that you find on the Web for personal use, but never oh never for a commercial use. You are just setting yourself up for a suit when you do that. The bigger company are the more you will be a target and so need to stay squeaky clean on that issue.

There are some terrific photo sites where you can buy a one time one use image for as low as $1 so there is just no excuse for snatching photos from Google images, from someone else’s website, or from a place like Flickr.