Pain at the Pump Fuels Publisher Pick-up

Published by Daysha on May 12, 2008 in BlogBurst Success Stories. 1 Comment

While oil prices continue to soar to record highs, the price of gas has pinched pocketbooks and sparked conversations surrounding everything from family travel and food prices to alternative fuels and political policies. The topic has landed in debates between presidential candidates who either favor or oppose a fuel tax holiday. In business news, the airline industry is taking a beating as jet fuel costs climb. On the home front, rising gas prices cause families to cancel their Summer vacation plans and begin checking their mailboxes for economic stimulus checks.

The topic of gas prices has yeilded increased placement opportunities as publishers utilize blogs from the BlogBurst network to provide additional coverage to readers. IBS has launched a “Gas Prices” section, featuring content from BlogBurst network members, across the majority of their local television station websites:

gas-prices1.PNG

Learn more about the topic by reading posts authored by some of your fellow BlogBurst bloggers who have been featured on IBS’ Gas Price news section:

Business
Fuel-enomics: 10 Tips for Small Businesses as Prices Continue to Rise - The goWholesale Blog
Dairy Farmers to Receive Help With Fuel Costs - Food and Fuel America.com
Gas and Diesel Prices Rocket Upwards…Again! - Food and Fuel America.com

Politics
Savings from suspending state gas taxes - Don’t Mess With Taxes
President Bush Troubled By High Gas Prices - Hutch Report
Hillary Spurns Economist on Gas Tax - Donklephant
Leading Democrats Side With Obama in Gas Tax Dispute - WSJ Washington Wire

Consumers
Drivers slow down as gas prices rise - Auto Insider Blog
American Life Altered by Rising Gas Prices - LiveScience.com Blogs
What’s Fueling Higher Food Costs? - Debtors Relief
Save Money on Gas Tips from Consumer Reports - The Sun’s Financial Diary
Tax Help - Tired of Those High Gas Prices? - “The Baby Boomer Generation”
Get An Oil Change and Save on Gas - Basil & Spice - Living Green!
Ease Gas Pump Pains by Replacing Old Habits with New Ones - Ask Patty

Take my PDA. Take my magazines. But don’t touch the chocolate.

Published by Daysha on May 9, 2008 in Blog Industry News. 1 Comment

According to an article published at The Center for Media Research blog, more than 36 million women work their way around the blogosphere each week, with more than 15 million women publishing content on a regular basis and more than 21 million reading blogs and engaging in comment conversations.

Of the more than 6,000 women surveyed by the BlogHer community, more than half would give up alcohol or their PDAs to keep the blogs they love. More than 40% would give up their iPod, newspapers, or magazines. Only 20% would give up chocolate. A survey to surface the number of women that are blogging about chocolate was not conducted.

Click here to access statistics and read more about the study.

[Image Source: Epromos]

Got Game?

Published by Tina on May 8, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Follow the action of the playoffs with BlogBurst’s newest publishing partner, NBA.com.

Nba.com screen shot

BlogBurst bloggers contribute to the coverage:

BlogBurst on NBA

20 Second Timeout

Hoops Addict

Reds Army

The Piston Post

Pounding the Rock

Third Quarter Collapse

Get More Comments

Published by Adam on May 6, 2008 in Blog Writing, Making Money Blogging and Promoting Your Blog. 1 Comment

BlogBurst participating blog and DIY marketing expert Duct Tape Marketing enumerates 7 ways to get more blog comments. DTM’s suggestions are made mostly in the context of furthering your small business efforts, but applicable to most blogs nonetheless.

Starting a Blog: Choose Your (Free) Software

Published by Tim on April 25, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology. 6 Comments

You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

blogger.gif

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

blogger2.gif

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

wordpress2.gif

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…

NBA bloggers - bring it (to BlogBurst)

Published by Dock on April 9, 2008 in General. 6 Comments

I know that you’re out there. You have every cable channel dedicated to sports. You follow every nuance of the players on and off the court. The sound of a ball popping through a net is deeply satisfying. And you probably wear retro jerseys to better restaurants. Best of all - you write about it constantly.

You’re an NBA blogger, aren’t you?

Now is the prime time for NBA bloggers to show us their stuff. Believe me when I say that we have some seriously interesting publishing partners who genuinely want basketball content - now is your chance! If you have an NBA blog, or know someone who does, please consider submitting it to Blogburst. I assure you, we’ll work to get you the widest exposure possible!

Killed By … Blogging?

Published by Tim on April 8, 2008 in General. 2 Comments

An article in the Sunday New York Times is getting a lot of play in bloggyland this week – In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. The gist is that a few prominent bloggers recently suffered heart attacks, and the culprit could be the never-ending stress cycle created by blogging, which just might kill you.

My first reaction was: come on, New York Times, is there really a story here?

Any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for long hours obsessively watching any kind of information leads to high stress and little physical movement. Is blogging different from day trading, online gambling, or even traditional journalism? I bet stress has taken its toll in those professions too. Or is it just that blogging is a hot topic, so you combine blogging with regular work stress, hit “enter” and you’ve got a story with legs? (Not to mention that some blogs aren’t exactly on the stress program, like the once-a-week-if-that-often Becker-Posner Blog, one of my faves.)

Yet the more I mull it over, the more I think the Times is onto something: the blogosphere does seem to pull successful bloggers toward obsessiveness and high-stress behavior.

In our network (and in the blogosphere in general), the most successful blogs are ones that post frequently and also cover the new developments in their fields. And if you want to keep up with the latest developments, you’re signing up for a never-ending barrage of information — Google Alerts, RSS blog updates, instant messages, emails, comments on your posts. And you might as well get a BlackBerry or an iPhone to ensure you can never escape. As your traffic grows so do the inputs, and the information vortex builds upon itself. The more your attention is dominated by the screen, the more you are apt to sit in one place, maybe eat some potato chips (I think I’m going to go get some right now).

I’m certainly not in a position to give health advice, but what the heck — it’s spring, take a minute to get up and walk around. Go outside and smell the air.

Try to maximize your efficiency. Some bloggers collaborate with others to cut down the work, others make sure to include good search engine optimization as a way of getting more for less.

You’ll also find lots of good tips for work-life balance out there on the Web, and the “getting things done” mavens are full of tips for making your workday (and night) more efficient (like checking your email once an hour instead of every 10 seconds).

Of course, you also can just live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful blog.

Madness Is Good for BlogBurst Bloggers

Published by Daysha on March 21, 2008 in BlogBurst Success Stories and General. 5 Comments

We are just approaching the second round of March Madness and publishers have created a big dance of their own with posts from the BlogBurst network. Both IBS and Cox Ohio have picked up posts for placement in the sports sections of multiple television websites.

I’m Writing Sports’ post, “Bracketology 101: Back to the Basics,” has been featured in the March Mania sections of television sites such as Whio.tv, Kansas City TV 5, The Pittsburgh Channel, Click on Detroit, and NBC 5 Chicago, as well as on Cox Ohio’s Dayton Daily News. Other blogs posting on the hoopla include Hoopraker, Conquest Chronicles, Bruins Nation, A Sea of Blue, and The Big Dance Blog.

Have you got some spring love from publishers that are placing your March Madness posts? Let us know in the comment section below.

Aside from March Madness posts, other bloggers are experience some Spring love from publisher placement opportunities.From Newslite.tv:

My blog has been on BlogBurst for just over one week now and in the past seven days I have had over 73,000 headline impressions and my posts have been used on Reuters, USAToday.com and Chicago Sun Times - wow…

I only have good things to say about BlogBurst and the visibility it have a given my blog. In terms of headline impressions, post placement and click through rate it has exceeded all of my expectations.

 

Guide to Blogging From BlogBurst Bloggers

Published by Daysha on March 18, 2008 in Blog Writing. 3 Comments

Editors at BlogBurst always try to offer as much advice as possible surrounding the art of blogging. But who better to offer blogging advice than your fellow BlogBurst members? Check out these informative posts from BlogBurst network bloggers for some great tips and tricks for starting, maintaining, and attracting visitors to your blog.

Ecommerce Sites are Boring! Add Personality and Passion with a Blog!
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

Blogging is Easy? Um, No. Here’s the Cold Hard Truth…
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond shovelware
From howardowens.com

How to install WordPress on your computer?
From Createlf

Plugins By The Bucketload
From My Radical Blogs

5 Easy Wordpress Tweaks For SEO and VEO
From Social marketing, Web 2.0 News, & Blog Promotion

Top Bloggers Essential Research Tools - How Amy Gahran Maintains Info-Provocateur Status
From B.L. Oschman’s weblog

The A-List, Part 2: Be The Source
From Everybody Go To

Is embedding better than quoting?
From Matthew Ingram

7 Tools For Blogging On Your Phone
From Mashable!

How to fight trackback spam in your WordPress blog?
From Jammed: Full into Capacity

How to Unlame Your Business Blog: 10 New Tricks for Old Dogs
From Business BlogWire

Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation
From Mashable!

Blogging Ethics 101b - Commenting
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

Blogging and the Box Office

Published by Tina on March 13, 2008 in General. 3 Comments

Nielsen is introducing  some new reports aimed at online community interaction.  Nielsen PreView will incorporate the company’s many research divisions and tie the data to the entrainment  industry.

The initial report  analyzed the box office performance of 400 recent films, finding that titles grossing at least $100 million in sales are likely to have received elevated levels of attention on blogs.  More details, here.

Some of my favorite film bloggers are:

/Film - Blogging the Reel World

The IFC Blog

Film School Rejects