Erich Stauffer

Tag: Content Creation

  • Too Much Content – Advice I Love to Ignore

    If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been told there is too much content I’d have, like $5.

    The thing I see right away in the content is that there is far too much content. MORE PICTURES!!” -Sam, Web Designer, 11/16/2012

    I agree! We need more pictures. Who’s going to take them?

    When people say that a website needs less text, what they are really describing is a graphic design problem. They want a zero-entry, spoon-fed, baby-stepped introduction to the content. “Start me off with two-to-three words and a picture. If I like what I see, I’ll keep going.”

    Too Much ContentType text layout is just as important as the pictures used on a website. Large fonts, small fonts, bold fonts, and font spacing can all play towards the readability of a site. A web site can be filled with text and still be readable as long as the text is organized correctly.

    Okay, I get websites, but what about Social Media?

    This morning one of my managers emailed me a link to Mashable’s Sorry, Marketers, You’re Doing Facebook Wrong. In it the author goes over a recent report that states, “When it comes to posts, less is more,” and “suggests a self-imposed 80-character wall for Facebook posts.” People are so “bombarded” with posts that we need to limit what we’re saying down to 80-character posts in order to get people to like us.

    How about we make the posts as long as is appropriate for the material and the medium? For longer posts, consider writing an ebook, white paper, or a long blog post. Longer social posts are socially acceptable on Google+, but not as much on Tumblr or Facebook (Google+ tends to have a more intellectual crowd).

    So is a ton of content good or bad? I’m confused.

    Imagine if Google had the choice between serving up your 80-character post or your 10,000 word essay. Which one would it choose? The one that answers the question. Google wants to deliver the best results so that people keep using it and so they can keep selling ads. Aim to answer people’s questions (ie. add value) and it doesn’t matter how long your content is.

    I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” ― Mark Twain

    Neil Patel, a content marketing expert, recently wrote How Long Should Each Blog Post Be? In short, he found that the more established a brand is, the less they have to write. Conversely, the less established a brand, the more they have to write. This is how Nike can get away with short taglines in their advertisements, but newcomers have to use long sales letters to convince buyers.

    One other aspect to consider is market sophistication levels. At sophistication level 1, no one knows what your product is or what it does. It’s totally unique and so it needs a lot more information written about it. At level 2 there are competitors so you’re only talking about what makes your product different. Each of the 5 levels states less and less about what the product actually does.

    Content Length is Contextual

    A good content marketer will take into account the medium he’s writing for, the target audience, and the market sophistication level of the product when determining how much content is too much content. Blanket statements like “there’s too much text” or “people don’t like to read” are simply not true without context. There is a time and place for all types of content length.

  • Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    If I were tweeting today I would have wrote: WordPress is not so much a content management system as much as a content display system.

    Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    A content management system (CMS) designed by Erich Stauffer would allow content to be platform-agnostic. In DRY (don’t repeat yourself) terms, the content would be an object who’s repurposing could be tracked. Essentially, the content management system would not store the content, but report on the status and whereabouts of the content. Let me explain with an example.

    Example: A blog post is written in WordPress. The dashboard in the CMS sees this new post via RSS and prompts the viewer to describe (via checkboxes) whether or not the material has been repurposed as a video, soundcloud, podcast, slideshare presentation, or as part of an email has been backlinked from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

    In essence, the CMS would work more as a marketing automation workflow tool – guiding you through the process of wringing out as much value from each initial post as possible. This same process could be accomplished via any sort of trusted system: pencil and paper, Word worksheets, Excel spreadsheets, Trello, or even WordPress itself via custom code.

    I have yet to do it manually even once, yet I have recommended it to others many times. I’m not sure a tool would make me want to do it more, but ‘doing’ is not what I do. ‘Changing’ is what I do. That’s how I’m wired and I’m fine with that, but it doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t good or helpful for production workers who are more comfortable creating content in a structured environment.

    It’s not that I don’t do stuff. I do practically whatever anyone tells me to do. I guess it would make more sense to put that line in context. I once worked in a corporate department where my boss used an analogy about us being the rudder and ‘ops’ being the engine. I had very little ‘corporate’ experience prior to working there and had never worked as a business analyst before. (I am very thankful for the opportunity as I feel it was one of the best jobs I ever had.)

    As a result of my intial ignorance of how to be a business analyst, I wasn’t aware that other people had a similar or different opinion on the subject of how organizations should be organized. I only knew of it as ‘how my boss thought’. It wasn’t until after I visited the “Indianapolis Leadership Circle” (formerly known as the Leadership Mastery Group) put on by Tony Piazza that I heard something similar from the speaker, Scotty Bevill. He said (paraphrased for convenience):

    [Project managers] don’t like to run things – we like to build, change, and refine things. That’s just who we are as people.

    I use that word “people” specifically as Scotty was very adamant about business being “people dealing with people” and that we shouldn’t try to take the “human” out of who we are. The people in the room at the leadership meeting were mostly project managers who were mostly former IT workers. The other people in the room were current IT workers (such as myself, who is currently an IT Specialist in my day job). This is more of a belief about who we are as workers, not as much about the willingness to do or not do work. People like us (project managers and business analysts) prefer to be change agents, not production workers.

    Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    Permission to speak freely? Okay, for a second here I’m going to throw out all preconceived notions of what I should or should not do, what I am or am not capable of, and what does or does not make business sense. I’m just going to say what I think I want to do and then step back to see what sticks. As Scotty Bevill says, “Start with what is known.” Here’s what I know: I have found a way to add a sales funnel dimension to keyword research. Let’s call these “buyer keywords”.

    • Once you have identified ‘buyer keywords” you can start to write content that attracts those searchers.
    • Once content is created it can be both backlinked from social media and repurposed into other content.
    • Once visitors start coming to the content, the content can be optimized to increase conversions.

    Compendium, a business blogging platform which recently got purchased by Oracle, has 3 steps to create content which are 1) Research 2) Organize and 3) Create. I’d like to create a service that does 1) SEO Keyword and Competition Research 2) Creates and Manages Content and 3) does A/B Optimization.

    Content Repositories

    Update: Since writing this I’ve since discovered something called a “Content Repository“. There are several types, but what they all have in common is a clear separation between the content and the presentation of the content. What I’m still looking out for (and willing to provide as a service until software can be built around it) is a way to track all content like a database and know when and/or how often it’s been linked out via social media or to certain social bookmarking sites and whether or not it’s been repurposed to a pre-defined selection such as Youtube, Soundcloud, or Podcast.

    So when you take what I consider to be my ‘flux capacitor moment’ where I realized I had this ‘super power’ to attract customers to me by writing what matters to the customer and add in what I’ve since learned about content marketing, customer acquisition systems, and customer development I’ve got a knowledge base that is poised to be leveraged with the right content management system. By system I mean the methods (processes + tools) that can multiply the efforts of a content marketer by first finding out who is already seeking their product and writing directly to that person.

    I’m not sure how to do this, but those are my collection of ideas.

  • Customer Acquisition Systems in a Marketing Ecosystem

    You may have heard of “marketing platforms“, but I’d like to introduce what I’d like to call “marketing ecosystems”.

    What is a Marketing Ecosystem?

    While a marketing platform contains a ‘home base’ such as a web site and its corresponding marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Books – a Marketing Ecosystem takes a slightly broader view and encompasses:

    • The Marketing Platform
    • The People Doing the Marketing
    • The Processes of the Platform & the People
    • The Technology used by the People
    • A/B Testing, Events, Analytics, SEO, Twofers

    Customer Acquisition Systems in a Marketing EcosystemA Marketing Ecosystem is a Customer Acquisition System that funnels traffic and buyers from the Marketing Platform into a trusted Onboarding System that has feedback loops to the Marketing Platform.

    The outputs are blog posts, videos, social shares, books, events, products, and services. The inputs are traffic, phone calls, email, email sign-ups, new clients, and revenue. I’ve written before about how books are the new business cards, but now books can be your advertising too.

    Licensing & Commercialization of Intellectual Property (Twofers)

    In marketing terms, this is referred to as “repurposing content“. Content is the energy that keeps this Marketing Ecosystem running. Content creates traffic. Traffic leads to revenue.

    The most effort should be spent on making the best content possible. Marketers will say “make it share-worthy” or “remarkable“, but let’s get back to basics. It needs to be quality. Quality attracts quantity. This is the core of Content Marketing.

    An Example of Content Flow Through the Marketing Ecosystem

    A trusted, knowledgeable person is mined for their insight. This insight is edited into a series of blog posts, a book, and several videos. In each of these marketing channels, backlinks are placed to buy a product or service and sign up for an email list. The same content is then sent to this email list with more links to buy products or services, but everything should be tested.

    Test Everything (Beta Title for this Section Until Further Tests Completed)

    Test Everything is a Marketing Ecosystem tenet. In SEO, conversions, and sales, the single most important element is the TITLE of the page, post, book, or sales brochure. In books, the cover is the second most important element. But how do you test? Using Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads, test titles and covers until a significant improvement in sales is discovered.

    Don’t Forget About the People or the Products and Services

    Remember that this Marketing Ecosystem is made up of people talking to people who have problems that the products or services solve. People are messy, emotional, and rarely rational. They make decisions based on copy, design, urgency, FAQs, or personal referrals. And keep in mind that the people who answer the phone or emails also have emotions – so they need properly trained, but all of this cannot happen without quality products and/or services.

    The marketing ecosystem can be perfect, but it will implode if the product or service is awful. A Marketing Ecosystem Engineer must ascertain whether or not a product or service is worth supporting or whether the product or service first needs further developed.

    On Building a Customer Acquisition System using a Marketing Ecosystem

    Once a marketing ecosystem is fully understood and the product or service has been fully vetted, a Customer Acquisition System can be built. This system would provide the editing and implementation of the web and social design, content creation, distribution, events, referral connections, email marketing, onboarding training, and do A/B testing and analytics. This system could be offered as a service.

    An Example of a Customer Acquisition System at Work

    A dentist is interviewed for his dental knowledge. This is turned into a series of blog posts and videos. Each of these have the opportunity to directly sell or add to an email list. The blog posts are turned into a book, which is sold on Amazon. This book also has links back to his products and services + the ability to sign up for his email list. The dentist can now claim that he is a published author. Each title and cover is A/B split tested to ensure the highest ranking and payout – and ultimately increased conversions.

    How I Have Applied This System in the Past

    I have attempted to create and use a system like this by taking some of my most popular blog posts on Erich Stauffer figurines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) into an ebook on Amazon. However, I did not test the cover and feel that its design has hampered it’s sales. My Youtube channel is called “TheBlogReader” because it was meant to record me reading my blog posts as a form of repurposing content. I only did that a couple of times though, however I still recommend it to my clients, but they hardly ever want to do it. Maybe they are expecting me to do it for them. Video is one of the things I am going to be working on more this year.

    How to Create a Customer Acquisition System

    I’d like to say I have this all figured out, but I’m still learning and trying new things. I’m going to apply some of these principles to a new project I’m working on – one that I can’t share yet – but if you run a business in the Indianapolis area and want to talk about it, please let me know.

  • Content Marketing

    5 Ways to Create Great Content Marketing:

    • Write What Matters to the Customer – Write from your customer’s point of view. Take the time to figure out what they care about – not just the features of your product. In other words, think like a salesman and do your homework. Go where your customers are hanging out online and see what issues they are having with your product or products like it. Write the answers to these problems. Be the answer to there problems.
    • Be Human – Computers have evolved. They can now write articles (1,2, 3), but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about bleeding on the page. Share your mistakes along with your triumphs – like how I wrote over a year ago that my new focus was on content marketing yet I’m just now writing this post. I’m human and I run a small business. This means I am not a machine and can adapt on the fly and relate to humans.
    • Provide Evidence – While you wouldn’t know it from reading this article, pictures and video are the best evidence and it’s what people look for most when they are shopping for a new product or service. If you can’t throw up a gallery or make a short video then at least offer some case studies to show that your product works and some real, believable testimonials from clients who have used your products or services.
    • Tell Stories – Ever notice how great speakers start off by telling a story? It pulls you in and causes you to listen in for the rest of the presentation. Stories are how our brains remember things. That’s probably why Jesus used parables to answer questions. He knew that if he simply answered the questions the answers wouldn’t have had the same effect. Stories stick and to learn more, read Made to Stick by the Heath brothers.
    • Do Something Worth Sharing – This is one of the hardest and most profound steps to content marketing. Why? Because it means you have to actually be good at something, which requires work. Or you have to get out of your chair, go out into the world, and do something worth writing about. That’s not easy to do. That’s because it’s rare – and rare things are valuable. That’s why when people find them they want to share.

    Developing a Content/Market Fit

    Last year I adapted the customer development process for content marketing and developed a way to create content that achieves what I called content/market fit. This content development process allowed our content to be the answer to other people’s problems. When someone would search for the problem they’re having, my client’s solutions are displayed as the answer. This is how I am able to work in sync with Google’s goal of wanting to deliver the most relevant content to users seeking out answers to their problems.

    Content marketing is about writing solutions for your customer’s problems instead of just writing about your products. In 2012 I wrote, “It’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.” Today that’s more true than ever before. Even though I recently wrote on Twitter that content marketing hasn’t worked for this blog, I still believe that content marketing is the best way to attract customers when marketing online.

    Blog Posts about Content Marketing

    In 12 Ways to Make Money Online I wrote about how good content helps attract good ads, adds value to affiliate marketing posts, helps with direct sales, and can even be converted into a book, magazine, or television show. In Write What Matters to Your Customer I wrote about how content is more important than SEO. “Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless,” it’s just that good content will beat SEO hands-down every time. This is because Google wants to deliver the best results to it’s customers every time. In my 2012 trends report I wrote about how, “It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it.” In other words, don’t be noisy.

    When I wrote about how I started my web design business I wrote, “what mattered more [than SEO] was the creation of content…My business shifted away from SEO and web marketing (although still very important) and into content marketing, management, and analysis. Google is constantly changing it’s algorithm, but content will always remain king. The problem is that as content grows, it starts to need managed.” Later I wrote, “Managing larger back archives of web data used in content marketing. Over the course of time, things you might have wanted to happen in the past to every web post in WordPress may not always apply in the present or the future.”

    Indianapolis-Area Content Marketing

    I help business owners in the Indianapolis area write content for their websites, blogs, or email marketing newsletters that answers their customer’s problems leading to more organic traffic and less customer service issues. By spending more time finding out what problems your customers are having, you’ll spend less time in the customer creation process and more time making money in the company building process. How can I help you build your company? Contact me for a free one-hour consultation or business strategy session. I’ll even type up all of your ideas and send them to you in an email so you have them for posterity. Sound like fun?

  • Trends

    We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

    1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
    2. Commitment – “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
    3. High Value Content – This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
    4. Humanization – This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
    5. Case Studies – Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
    6. Stories – Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
    7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

    Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

    Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

    High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

    Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

    Case Studies – Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

    Stories – If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

    Do Something Great – It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

    In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

    “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
    – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

  • Write What Matters to Your Customer

    I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).

    Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:

    What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.

    After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.

    The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.

    Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.

  • How to Survive the Summer Slump

    There’s an old saying, “You can plant a tree any month with an ‘r’ in it,” which means you’ll have the most success during the months with more naturally occurring rainfall. Of course you can plant trees any month of the year (as long as the ground is not frozen), but from May to August you’re going to have to water the trees to keep them alive. The same thing is true for building up an Internet business because if traffic is rain, then it ‘rains’ the least in months without an ‘r’ in them, which may explain why September traditionally sees the most traffic and is the most productive month. The correlation between traffic and productivity is thought to be because people are getting ‘back to work’ and feeling refreshed after the many events and vacations they took over the summer. Taken a step further, the reason for the down-turn in Internet traffic is probably due to those same events and vacations – and generally people are inside less. Yes, people browse the Internet on their phones, but most Internet (non app) purchases are made from a traditional computer browser.

    So what does that mean for Internet marketers?

    The first step is to recognise what is happening. You can’t and won’t change human behavior, but you can do two things to help keep your business from experiencing a summer slump:

    1. Build during the down time.
    2. Build for the down time.

    Build during the summer for fall, winter, and spring sales

    If most to all of your traffic is organic, you’re going to want to build and backlink before you expect the most sales. It doesn’t make sense to build and launch a new web site or product for Christmas in December. There is just not enough time to become a market leader. However, if you had built for Christmas during the summer, you would be poised for success come December.

    Build web sites or products specifically for the summer down times

    You may have heard of the Internet marketing term, “evergreen markets”, which means markets that are always in season. Commodities like food and energy are good examples, but evergreen markets are susceptible to downturns in overall traffic, so building a ‘summer niche’ during the winter months is recommended for riding out the summer slump. Some ideas include travel, outdoor sporting equipment, camping gear, or clothing.

  • 6 Steps to Making Money Online

    Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in marketing products for profit.

    When you use keywords that people are searching for, you naturally drive traffic to your site, which in turn makes you money online. But how do you find the right keywords and how do you know what people are searching for?

    There are six key steps to this process which will answer all of these questions:

    1. Find Micro-Niche Keywords – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling. A micro-niche is a subset of a market niche.
    2. Verify Keyword Volume – Using WordTracker and/or the Google External Keyword Tool, make sure searches are over 80 per day and that there are under 30,000 search results overall.
    3. Verify Keyword Competition – Determine whether or not you will be able to penetrate the top 10 results in Google based on the number of top-level domains listed, their age, and number of backlinks.
    4. Produce Keyword-Rich Content – Write content for your primary landing page that also contains your primary keywords and links to sub-pages that contain longer keyword phrases.
    5. Promote Using Keywords – Write articles, blog posts, and lenses for posting on other web sites that link back to your sub-pages with your longer keyword phrases. Post at least two Youtube videos.
    6. Sell Products or the Web Site Itself – At this point, if you followed all of the steps, you should be making money online by selling products.  If not, then consider selling the domain for a profit online at Flippa or Sedo.

    The rate of success with this method is roughly 1 out of 8 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days.  Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities).  Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

  • Top 5 Quick and Dirty Hosted Blog Publishing Services

    Whether or not you have your own domain, sooner or later you’re going to have the need for a hosted blog platform to create more backlinks.

    Webories, the web directories web site, has two articles on hosted blog publishing services* (“Top 5 Hosted Blog Publishing Services” and “Top 5 Hosted Micro-Blogging Publishing Services”) that I would like to add to with my top 5 ‘quick and dirty’ hosted blog publishing services. Some of these are new to me, but they come recommended by The Challenge, which I also recommend for anyone starting out making money online.

    1. LiveJournal – a free blog publishing service centered around it’s users. There are paid options to make it more secure. “Discover global communities of friends who share your unique passions and interests.”
    2. Xanga – “The Blogging Community” is a free blog publishing service. It’s ad based, but paid options reduce the number of ads. You can also get a personalized URL (domain name). If you do, make sure it contains your primary keywords.
    3. Blogger – Blogger is an easy way to share your thoughts about anything. There are a host of features to make blogging as simple and effective as possible and integrating with Google Adsense is a snap.
    4. Identi.ca – Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service. Join for free to share short (140 character) notices which are broadcast to their friends and fans using the Web, RSS, or instant messages.
    5. Posterous – Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. You email us at post@posterous.com and we reply instantly with your new posterous site. If you can use email, you can have your own website to share thoughts and media with friends, family and the world. And they don’t care what anyone says, “Posterous is NOT a micro blog!”

    *A blog publishing service is inherently hosted by someone else who manages the server, its software, and its settings. It’s a kind of software-as-a-service, or SAAS thing. Blog platforms, on the other hand, is blogging software that you host on your own server or hosting company’s server. You manage the software and its settings. A good example is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a blog publishing service while WordPress.org is a blog platform. They both use the same software – the difference is in who maintains it: you or them.