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I was always taken by the character of Don Juan’s mother in Lord Byron’s epic version Don Juan. She was portrayed as a woman who knew just enough about everything to be charming and interesting at parties, yet there were no topics at all where she had deep knowledge.

Use Your Knowledge
I’m sure you could have done without the literary reference, but what I’m saying is that it’s great to be an expert about something. When you have a lot of useful knowledge about any given topic, people will generally look to you as an authority in that area. Why should you let that be something that only happens when your friends and family come to you for advice? You may as well capitalize on it.

“Bee” an Expert
The internet gives you the entire world as your audience. Take your expertise and write articles that will educate and assist others. eBuzz is an appealing little website (with the fun motto “Bee an Expert”) that gives people everywhere a platform for their expert status. It doubles as a social networking site, allowing writers to connect with one another, find peers in your interest area, send and receive private messages, ask other users questions, and much more.

If your articles become popular enough, you can even win prize money. How’s that for an incentive?

All Topics are Fair Game
eBuzz.com is easy to navigate. Topics and subtopics are clearly labeled and you can even browse articles according to their popularity and usefulness. The subject areas are boundless. I’ve read great articles like “What Vitamins Help in Acne Problems and Treatment,” “How to Find a Good Dog Trainer,” and “Choosing a Bicycle Rack for Your SUV Vacation.” Seriously, there is an expert out there for almost anything you can imagine.

Social networking is decidedly hot right now. I won’t even try to debate that. What is not so hot these days are catch-all social networking sites, like MySpace. As social networking evolves and picks up more and more devotees, people have started looking for niche communities that cater to specific interests.

Find Your Niche
As a blogger, I have to admit that the new community SocialSpark is the social networking community where I have been spending most of my free internet time. And believe me; I don’t have all that much free time, so I have to be fairly judicious in my choices.

SocialSpark is without a doubt fine-tuned to meet the needs of bloggers and the people who love them. Bloggers can create a personal profile and separate profiles for each of their blogs. In fact, here’s the link to the profile page for Suncoast Scribe. You can give props (essentially like voting) to the blogs you love. You can keep a friends list to help you keep track of your favorite bloggers.

Advertisers Love Bloggers
The site also addresses the tried and true fact that advertisers love bloggers and the people who read blogs. Therefore, advertisers can create profiles, reach out to individual bloggers, and even create advertising campaigns. In this manner, the bloggers get a better feel for what the advertisers are all about and the advertisers are able to learn more about the bloggers who are out there willing to review products and services.

I love that SocialSpark gives me a transparent way to display my blogs’ daily statistics. I know that information about my traffic and the demographics about my readers are important to advertisers, and even to other bloggers and readers.

NoFollow is Hot
Best of all, SocialSpark offers a marketplace where advertisers can enlist bloggers to help promote their websites and products by creating genuine buzz. And, all paid blogging jobs use the “nofollow” tag, period. It’s a search engine friendly process of generating valid opinion articles. In fact, take a look at the links I have used in this article (for which I was compensated) and you will see that I have used the nofollow attribute.

When most people hear about a new product, the first thing they want to know is what other people think of the product. I think that is why companies like Consumer Reports has done so well for so long. They actually test out products and then give an unbiased review.

I don’t put a whole lot of reviews on this blog, but I will tell you that some of the highest traffic I have received on individual blog articles on Suncoast Scribe has been for when I reviewed Pizza Hut’s Pizza Mia, the movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and Kids 2 in 1 Smoothers by Suave. Readers like to know they are getting a real product review from someone who is not sitting behind a desk at an ad agency.

(To be fair, I actually have worked in public relations, advertising, and television production in my past, so I understand HOW to write a review. Still, I pride myself on this website for giving honest, unforced opinions.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that I also appreciate reading honest reviews written by others. I have some friends who actually write blogs 100% dedicated to reviewing products, usually from the point of view of a mom. One of those blogs is Lisa Reviews. Lisa actually writes several highly-readable blogs, but this particular blog is dedicated to relevant, topical product reviews.  Recently she has reviewed Town House FlipSides, Bee Movie, and the LeapFrog LeapStart Learning Table — just to name a few.

I think you’ll really like it.

When you are a mom, it is somehow a great comfort to read about the everyday lives of other moms. It makes you feel more in tune, more normal, and a lot less alone. I’m not sure I would have said I liked to read about the day-to-day musings of a mom before I had my own daughter, but I can sure say it now.

I love to read blogs written by Mommy Bloggers.

Looking at the demographics of this blog’s traffic, there is a reasonable chance that if you are reading this right now, you are also a mom. So, with that in mind I will pass along to you from time to time the blogs of other moms. In fact, here’s one for you now: My Take, the blog of a New York mom with a background in education. Give it a read.

There is sticky and then there is sticky. I am not talking about the kind of sticky that gets on your fingers after you’ve eaten a honey comb. I’m talking about the term people use to describe a website that has all the right elements needed to keep your visitors coming back over and over.

There are a number of things you can go to bring visitors back to your site:

1. Keep It Fresh
Make sure you keep the content fresh, new, and ever changing. When people know that they will always see new articles and information when they return to your site, they will eventually make returning a port of their internet surfing habits.

2. Incorporate user-generated content.
I use a discussion forum one of my websites. The members of the forum are constantly making posts that add to the useful content of my overall site. People come back daily to check and see what it new on the forums. Once there, the main site is not far from there I minds anymore.

3. Use a newsletter and a mailing list.
This is my favorite option, because it is not dependant upon people remembering on their own to return to your site. You are reaching out and bring them back.

So, let’s elaborate on my last point: a newsletter. It is easier than you think to put together a simple e-mail newsletter that you can send out weekly or monthly to your site’s visitors to keep them abreast of what’s happening on your site. You send out the hook and they come back to read more.

You might think it would be a lot of work, but you can actually use content you have already developed. By using Zookoda, a free application designed with bloggers in mind (though content providers with rss/atom feeds can utilize it as well), you mail out a summary of your latest blog entries as often as you like.

Your subscribers are people who have sited your blog and use the custom newsletter subscription forms that you place on your site. Once you’ve created your mailing list, you just schedule broadcasts for each day, week or month. Your newsletters can even match the design of your blog, and they can be formatted for mobile readers.

Creating the e-mail that will go to your list is as easy as filling out a few fields.

Sticky. It’s all about sticky. Bring those readers back to your site, to your blog, to your business. And, keep them coming back on a regular basis. Before you know, you have a solid, regular reader base and a more successful website.

I run a mailing / discussion list with over 1600 members. They are all women who love to make hair bows, and most them have take their hobby one more step and started small businesses selling the bows that they craft.

Anyway, last week there was a discussion about blogging on the list and it turns out that a good many of the list members have blogs. Most were curious about how people monetize their blogs. I have been anxious to share with the group members the ways I make money blogging, but I have also been reluctant to give them any tips that might jeopardize the integrity of their blogs.

Yesterday the social networking site called SocialSpark went live! I have been chomping at the bit about this project and, in fact, was fortunate enough to be in as an Alpha tester. I signed up as soon as I was invited, and now that Social Spark is open to the public, I have been urging my friends, colleges, and fellow group members to follow suit.

Writing product and site reviews for monetary compensation is nothing new, but a system that has finally found a way to combat the negative views some people have about blogging for money is indeed new. Social Spark is unique, in that it offers bloggers ways to make money blogging, connect with other bloggers and the advertisers, drive traffic to your blog, and to do all of this while maintaining a completely open and ethical line of communication with your readers.

There are companies out there who will pay you to post positive reviews on any number of products, but they will also urge you to be a little shady while doing it. Social Spark, on the other hand, requires that each paid post that you write contain an In-Post Disclosure. They also ask that you let your readers know, via a posted Disclosure Policy, that you sometimes are compensated for wring a review. While other companies may insist that you only post glowing reviews, Social Spark wants your real thoughts and opinions.

And, best of all, all outgoing links that you are asked to include in your reviews will contain the “nofollow” tag, which means that you are making the search engines happy at the same time that you are providing your readers with useful information. This also means that your paid links, when paired with the use of No Follow, should comply with even Google’s stringent guidelines. If Google is true to their word, that means that any posts you make via Social Spark will not cause ranking penalties.

My favorite part of Social Spark is that is it not simply a site focused on transactions and money. It is also a fully functioning social networking site. You can connect with other bloggers and the advertisers that are out there looking for great writers to help them spread the word about their sites and products.

It is the open nature of the blogger-advertiser relationship that really makes Social Spark ground-breaking.
Not only can bloggers and advertisers see my blogger account, they can also click through and view more detailed information about each of my blogs, including specific stats regarding my traffic: age and gender demographics, where in the world my readers reside, and how people are finding my blog. Although I can find and take blogging assignments in the marketplace, advertisers can also contact me directly via the Social Spark interface and create assignments for me.

Here you can see some specific demographic info about the readers of this particular blog:

If you have been looking for ways to make your blog work for you, please take a minute and look around the site. It will be worth your while. And, while you are there, look me up.

There was a time that Google’s Page Rank system was innovative and exciting. Their proprietary algorithm assigned a rank between 1 and 10 to all WebPages, therefore giving said pages a rank of “value” to the company’s search engine.

Over time, people began to look at Google’s Page Rank as the simplest way to determine advertising value on a site. Although Page Rank never really took into consideration things like actual traffic, most people in the SEO community felt that PR was good enough when it came to justifying how they priced their ad space.

In the past year or so, Google’s Page Rank system has become a messy tangle of arbitrary exclusion, overvaluation, and undervaluation. No longer can you look at the PR for a website and accurately ascertain its inherent value.

The collective force of the internet has become untrusting of PR and has been looking in earnest for a successor. For some, systems like Alexa are a good indicator, because they determine a traffic pattern. But, Alexa only counts the traffic of users who have installed toolbar software. Then there is Technarati, but its system is also only based on incoming links.

Welcome IZEARanks to the world stage.

IZEARanks measures both your site’s traffic and incoming live links (note that I said LIVE links). In fact, the ranking system is totally transparent and it is no secret that the numbers are calculated using the following data: 70% daily unique visitors, 20% daily active inbound links, and 10% daily page views. Right now blogs are the only sites the ranking system measures, but right now blogs are what a majority of the advertisers out there are looking for when it comes to finding wise ways to spend their advertising dollars.

IZEARanks collects the data it uses directly from the website. They do not use third-party measuring sources. There is no room for opinion, perception, or penalty in the IZEARanks system. It is all about daily, dynamic numbers. In fact, a site’s RealRank (RR) can change from day to day, because the rankings are constantly being updated.

Here is a simple graph charting this site’s performance for the past week. Of course, I have access to more detailed numbers, but this is a quick, visual way to see how my blog is doing in terms of traffic and linking.

Personally, I am excited about the potential behind using a RealRank. I want to be able to show my site’s advertisers exactly what kind of traffic they are getting for their advertising dollars. I want them to be able to see trends over a week, or month, or even year. I want the kind of dynamic calculations IZEARanks can offer. The internet changes from day to day. I am not content to use a ranking system, like Google’s RP, that only updates four times a year and often arbitrarily manually overrides scores. I want real numbers for the real internet.

I’m a single mom now and I look around at my life and realize I never, ever thought I would have to find a way to support my child on my own. I assumed, back when I was married, that I would be home for my daughter and once she was older I would work part-time. As it stands I will eventually need to work outside the home again fulltime (more than likely by utilizing my teacher certification here in Florida), but for now I have found ways to make money from home so I can be home with Gigi for a couple of more years. I’m what a lot of people call a Mommy Blogger.

Mommy Blogger has become a convoluted term, but if I were to define it I would have to say that a Mommy Blogger is someone who blogs either for pleasure or for income, with a definitive focus on writing about parenting, children, education, and similar topics. Mommy Bloggers tend to be stay-at-home moms (SAHM) and as such, they are in a particular demographic that is well revered by advertisers. They tend to have the purchasing power of the entire family behind them, and more often than not they make most of the purchasing decisions for the home.

Enter companies like SocialSpark, a social networking hybrid that brings together bloggers and advertisers in a mutual union. It’s an ideal environment for a typical Mommy Blogger. It incorporates the best in social networking and also provides the chance to make a little extra money while doing what you love to do anyway – that is, blogging. I’m making the most of my demographic and that of my readers.

SocialSpark is in an invite-only  alpha right now, but you can visit the site and sign up for the mailing list so you’ll be one of the first know when it’s time to sign up.

On a personal level, I am just happy that I have a way to be there day in and day out for my daughter. It is what I always wanted and it’s the best gift I can give my child right now.

I don’t thank my reader enough. Some leave comments. Others e-mail me. I almost always pick up some great tips or new insight about a topic. Earlier this week I was talking about finding a Vegas hotel for a girls’ weekend away and one of my friends suggested an alternate hotel, giving me new material to research. I’m often handed viewpoints about news issues that did not occur to me when I initially wrote my articles. I’ve received a lot of insightful e-mails regarding the teacher-student sex scandal in Pasco County, FL. They have been eye-opening, to say the least, and have shown me more than I ever wanted to know about my old neighborhood. (I don’t miss Longleaf at all!)

I love the interaction of a blog, and I want people to know I enjoy the input and comments. If you disagree, I enjoy knowing about that as well.

I have a mailing list that is affiliated with one of my non-blog websites where I mentor women who want to start small businesses in the crafting industry.

Since the group has almost 1500 members now, I tend to hear some of the same questions over and over. Many of them are very basic business questions and I truly don’t mind answering them more than once. I am finding that my best move would be to develop some useful articles to address some of the more frequently asked questions, though. So, let me start now.

What is web hosting?

When you first decide you want to have an online presence for your business, you will want to take the first steps to establish your own website. Doing this is not a one-step process. You have to secure a domain name for your site, which you will register with any of the online registrars out there. You pay a nominal annual fee for the right to “won” this domain name. This is something you need to renew as the years go on.

Separate from your domain name is web hosting. A web host is the company you will pay to host your website for you. Your website’s files will actually reside on their servers, which will be on all of the time so that your customers can access your site day or night. You pay the hosting company either monthly or annually, and prices vary tremendously.

You have to do some research before choosing a web host. Price is not the only factor to take into consideration. You want to look at the company’s longevity, reputation, average up-time, and what they are offering you in the hosting package.

You may just want simple pages with information about your business and what you offer. In that case, you can go with a basic hosting plan. On the other hand, perhaps you are looking to make your site fully interactive with a working shopping cart, discussion forums, blogs, and other features. If that is the case, you will want to make sure the package you contract includes those possibilities. Do you need to accommodate lots of traffic and bandwidth? Will your site be image intensive? These are just a couple of things to consider.

Once you have a good idea of what you need, your best bet is to use a website that reviews and rates popular hosting plans. Generally, this is where you can find feedback from existing customers, a synopsis of the plans and prices, and an overall rating. Such websites are great tools in your search for web hosting.

What page do you have set as your “home page” for when you first open a new browser window? Do you know what I mean? When you open Explorer or Firefox or Opera, which comes up on that page before you go surfing off to other sites? Is it your ISP’s default page, or maybe a blank page, or your fave search engine like Google? Right now I have a blank page set for Explorer and Speed Dial for Opera, but here is something absolutely cooler.

At HomePagle, you can effortlessly and fully customize your browser’s start page or “home page”. You choose the image you want (there are so many cool shots to browse through on their site). Then, you simply click the “Make My Homepage” button and a little window will pop up to tell you how to set your home page on whichever browser you are using. I was using Opera and Homepagle gave me a super easy step-by-step diagram showing me how to set the page in my browser.

Of course you can choose absolutely any image by just uploading it from your hard drive to the Homepagle servers. They will walk you through that, too.

I am feeling Spring in the air, plus I was just outside weeding my rose garden, so I picked the most stunning rose photo off of the Homepagle site and used it to set a new home page for my Explorer browser. A Google search box was automatically inserted, Here, this is what my new home page looks like:

And, here is a sample of one created using pics of Borat and the ever-amazing Captain Jack Sparrow.

Recognition is all about branding. When you see those golden arches from way down the highway, you know you are getting close to a McDonald’s restaurant. When you see someone running by with a Swoosh on their shoe, you know they are wearing Nike.

Children learn symbol recognition very early. They do not need to know how to read to know if they are looking at Coke or Pepsi. They just look for the branded symbol.

If you own a small business and do not have a logo that sums up your enterprise, you need to get on the ball. In fact, even a blogger will benefit from branding – the name of your site, a logo, even your colors. You want someone to be able to recognize your business simply by glancing at your logo. You want to find a logo design that is unique, simple, and speaks of what you represent.

I’ve worked as a graphic designer for years. I have worked with businesses to develop logos and full identities. It can be an expensive and time consuming process. That is why I was thrilled when I was asked to look at the LogoYes site, a DYI (do it yourself) logo design company.

I have nothing against people designing their own logos, but all too often I have seen people use low resolution clip art that will not print well when resized and looks unrecognizable if it is not printed in full color? Who has the money to print everything in full color? You need to have a scalable image that looks good even if it is stripped down to black and white.

All of the LogoYes elements are designed to look great no matter how large or small you resize your image. And, they print well in black and white. Plus, the design process is super fast and simple. You just need to choose how you want your logo to feel, as in bold or with flair. Then, you choose a logo, text, font, and colors. You can resize and move elements around on the page. It’s that simple.

I gave it a try and in about two minutes I had a logo for Suncoast Scribe that looks great.

Sounds too wild to believe, huh? It’s true, though.

Top Hosting Center (THC) is offering a one-of-a-kind new web hosting plan that works like this: You pay $95 USD and you get total web hosting and a free domain for life. They are only offering a limited number, to keep costs workable.

The special plan is called Rudolph, which is apt since this plan came about just before Christmas last year. It’s like a little gift in and of itself, too. In my opinion, this is the perfect plan for bloggers who are currently using free hosting somewhere. I have talked enough about the myriad of reasons why you need to have your own hosting plan and 100% control over your own blog. For $95 flat, you are getting some of the best hosting for your life and it costs less than some plans cost for one year.

One of my favorite Christmas presents I gave out this past year was a calendar I designed individually for each person who received one. I made one for my mom, for example, with pictures and layouts featuring the grandkids. I used digital scrap booking elements to make adorable designs, uploaded the pictures to Vista Print and ordered the calendar. Despite everything else my mom received as gifts, this was her favorite. In fact, when I got hers in the mail I was so impressed that I designed one for myself. I get SO many compliments on it.

I used to use a local print shop to do small jobs for me, but lately I have been relying more and more on Vista Print. I can upload my designs from home and complete my order in minutes. Then, they final product is shipped to my house. It’s never very expensive, they are forever offering free promotions, and their quality is fantastic.

I know you probably see the promos for free business cards all of the time, but Vista Print actually does everything from rubber stamps and brochures, to calendars and event invitations. In fact, right now they are running a special where you can order 10 free invitations just by using the promotional code BlogInvite10 when you check out.

For years now, Google’s PageRank system of ranking websites has dominated the economic climate of the internet. Almost exclusively, webmasters have designated the price they can command for advertising space on their websites and blogs based on their PageRank, or PR.

The inherent trouble with the PageRank method of rating sites is that it almost completely bases the rank (1 through 10, with 10 being the highest rank) on incoming links to your site. In fact, you can have a blog that is only read by your mother and you best friend, yet is ranked a PR 4 simply due to the fact that you sought out one-way incoming links from other highly ranked websites. You could have asked for those links or paid for those links, but the outcome would be the same.

What Google was not taking into consideration was the actual traffic to a website: page views, unique visitors, etc.

Say an advertiser paid $100 a month to have their banner ad on a Page Rank 5 site that received 100 unique visitors a day. At the same time, they pay $100 a month to a site with no Page Rank, but 1000 unique visitors a day. The odds are that the advertiser will see more click-through traffic and more sales from the site with the higher volume of traffic, especially if it is highly targeted.

It’s simple math.

So, how do we remedy this flawed ranking system?

IZEA recently launched IZEARanks. Their ranking system utilizes a small snippet of javascript that directly collects statistics on actual traffic. That data is then combined with additional counts of live incoming links to determine a rank called RealRank.

Right now, bloggers can go to IZEARanks.com and claim their blogs. In fact, the time is ripe to get into the system. They are giving away $1000 each week in February to the blog with the #1 RealRank. ChaChing! You can use their tools to chart the trends in your own site’s rank, or to compare your site to other sites using the RealRank indicators.

It’s a simple system and best of all, it’s a ranking method that finally makes sense!