If you’re a blogger, you have no doubt heard about link baiting – in other words link baiting is much like a viral campaign.

According to ProBlogger:

The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices – all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.

It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).

According to the definition provided by Wikipedia (for the term viral marketing):

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

The end result is that the webmaster/blogger is trying to generate buzz for their site/product/service and use various methods available to them to generate the buzz.

Link baiting could be as simple as running a contest where there is lots of money and prizes available – similar to the contest run over at Winning the Web – Craziest Internet Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen – $14,575 in FREE Cash & Prizes (note that this contest is now over).

Giving stuff away is one of the best ways to get those valuable inbound links from authority sites.

Another example – John Cow ran a contest not too long ago where you could win an XBOX360 Elite and a Copy of Grand Theft Auto 4.  Another great example of link bait – you can bet that there are numerous searches done daily on XBOX or WIN AN XBOX.  Every individual, webmaster and their dog must have been gunning to win the XBOX – not only that, you can bet that webmasters were promoting heavily!

Running a contest is a great way to get those valuable inbound links – done right, it doesn’t need to cost you anything other than the time and effort needed to organize such an event for your website.

What else can get you inbound links?  What other forms of link bait are there out there?

• Giveaways – tools, FREE premium wordpress templates and themes, plug-ins and widgets all are great link baits.  If you can provide webmasters with useful, fun or cool tools — they can quickly achieve “viral” status and you will get hundreds and even thousands of webmasters downloading the tool.

There are several other methods: lists (top 10 lists, top 100 lists, top reasons why, top reasons why not too – did you read my post on an endless supply of blog posts using lists?), awards, contests (we focused on contests in this post), quizzes/surveys — these always seem to draw visitors in.

ProBlogger has a more detailed list of 20 Linkbaiting Techniques that you can find by visiting ProBlogger, the post is a few years old — but the techniques will work as well today as they did when they were first discussed.

There is an excellent article on SEO Book entitled “Digg is for Dweebs: Free Link Bait Ideas” – well worth the read.  What made this post especially beneficial were the comments.  An offer was made to those that commented on the post:

Can’t think of a link bait idea for your topic? Tell me your topic in the comments of this post and I (or a hip SeoBook.com reader like Brian Clark) will reply with one or two ideas.

That post generated several pages of comments.  The one that I liked was to take a negative topic and put a positive spoin on it to try and generate link bait.  Here is the comment, followed by the suggestion:

Comment:

Aaron,

I have a online rental site where visitors and see and post rental homes.

I am working a link bait tool right now for my site, but I am always looking for ideas. Sometimes when you are too close to something you can’t be as creative.

Thanks, Dave

Suggestion:

Dave, go deep and strong:

7 Ways Your Landlord Will Screw You and Steal Your Money

Make it an in-depth tutorial, and offer it up in web and pdf formats. Make a video if you can.

That’ll work.

The idea would be to show prospective renters how landlords will try and getaway with their rental deposit and ways that you can protect yourself from the unscrupulous rental manager.

I tried this with my post yesterday – Why I’d Never Blog A Headline “Why Digg Sucks”.  I wasn’t that successful with it… 

No worries … we’ll just keep trying until we get the formula just right.

Want more?  There is an excellent entry over at Cornwall SEO entitled quite simply “Linkbait Articles“.  It is a collection of dozens of links from around the web that talk about – linkbaiting.

Technorati Tags: effective linkbaiting techniques, how to link bait, link bait, linkbait, linkbaiting

I was out and about, exploring the blogosphere and was actually looking for information on link baiting (or is that linkbaiting or link bait…) for research for a story that I’d like to work on and somehow managed to come across some posts on “Why Digg Sucks“.

As I started read the posts, some stretching back as a few years common themes emerged. But as I kept reading post, after post, after post – it was pretty damn clear that DIGG users LOVE DIGG. They will defend it to their death. They worship Kevin Rose and the rest of the DIGG team.

You should have read the hate comments directed at those webmasters that dared to even blog a post on “Why Digg Sucks“. Certainly I don’t want all that hate mail and clearly, you DO NOT want to be in the cross-hairs of any DIGG-fanatics.

So here are my reasons for why I would never want to write a blog post with a headline “Why Digg Sucks“

1. DIGG is good for your site, especially if a story just happens to get DUGG. Don’t complain if DIGG sends a gazillion visitors to your site, and you’re on a shared server, and your ISPs machines go down or cause major slow downs on the other sites. As some faithful, loyal as a dog DIGG users have said “it’s not our fault”. The claim is that if you don’t want the traffic, you should not have a website. Damn straight!
2. DIGG users are NOT elitist assholes. That’s right. They are not elitist assholes, dammit! If they were, DIGG would not allow open registrations to the site, or they would force you to answer personality tests. So don’t ever, ever, ever call a DIGG user an elitist asshole. They don’t like it. Not one bit. Oh did we mention that Wikipedia has reported that “100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg’s frontpage” as well “a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content”. As I said some of this information is from a rather old post, you can find one great article over at over at SEOmoz — that’s where the Wikipedia article has cited as its source for those stats. Like to see for yourself who are DIGG’s Top 100 Users? You can do so over at Chris Finkes’ site. And so while the numbers may show otherwise (some of the people in SEOMoz’ screen shot still show up in the list on Chris’ site) I am now more convinced that ever that DIGG users are not a bad bunch of elitist assholes. Digg no longer provides their own Top 100 Users list. So I guess we could have just as easily called this post “Top 100 Reasons Why DIGG Sucks“. DOH! I wasn’t supposed to say that.
3. DIGG users are smart, intelligent individuals as such they DO NOT click on advertisements that feature monkeys or sexy women. Uhhh…. OK. According to an April 9, 2007 post on Chitikas website, “DIGG traffic is more than 3 times Less Likely to Click on an Ad than Google Traffic“. So that must mean that Google traffic and users are somehow less intelligent than DIGG traffic and users. Makes sense, especially since DIGG USER ARE NOT ELITIST ASSHOLES they just don’t fall for all the gimmicky ads.

I could go into more details, but I’m sure the good DIGG users have heard it all before…

Technorati Tags: digg, digg does not suck, digg sucks, elitist

So unless you’re a prolific writer, and a creative genius it will probably take some time to come up with a killer blog post every day.

But I am about to share a technique with you that is guaranteed to provide you with an endless source of blog posts for your blog.  This techique is so successful, that I am using it on several blogs that I run with GREAT success!

The Technique Is…

You’ve seen TOP xx lists all over the place.  There is a list for everything, Top 10 List of Best Ways To… whatever you could want.

But do you know the one thing that is lacking in many of these lists?  Detail.  Content.  The meat!  In virtually 90% of the cases there is no content.  It’s a plain-jane list from 1 to xx that has a point, and a brief sentence or two about the point and that’s it.

Soooooo, what you could do is look at the oodles of lists out there.  Pick a few that are appealing – ideally you want to look at the number of comments received on the list and pick the top ones as those are the ones that generated the most impact (but remember – there is no guarantee that YOUR post will generate that much impact).

Look at each point, and quite simply – expand upon it.

For example, on my weight loss blog I wrote several lists years ago.  I’ve taken one of the lists and am converting each point into blog posts.  It is not difficult at all.  You CAN do the same with lists.  There are several bloggers doing just this (providing detail to their top xx lists) and they are attracting visitors.  While the lists themselves are great, they add even more value if you can expand up on them.

Think of it this way, is getting a list of Top 10 Ways to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings in point form with little to no explanation going to add value to your visitor?  OR is the same list, packed with solid information and perhaps examples as way of proof that the tips word more valuable to your visitor?  I would hope you answer the latter is more valuable.

Here is a great example of this at work in the make money online/internet marketing niche.

Alan Johnson over at The Rating Blog has dozens of blog posts which are nothing more than lists.  His latest series presents The Top Ten Traffic Triggers.  Rather than just give you a list, which is done and gone in one simple post, he’s broken each item in the list into its own story.

He’s given one post 10x the impact and has 10 well written posts that can be optimized for the search engines and social trafficked.  He has 10 posts that can be used for 10 days – the beauty is that each post could be written in a couple of days and time posted thereby feeing up time for the next set of Top 10 or Top 50 list!

Remember this – because it’s a series of 10 posts, his visitors will follow each post thereby increasing his page views, and visitor counts – win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win.

Each post is broken down into key sections:

• Things every webmaster needs to know
• Traffic potential
• Short-term benefits
• Long-term benefits
• Investment vs. reward
• Dangerous mistakes
• Recommended approach

In addition, each post in this particular series ends with valuable suggestions on how to use the idea so he may present free methods, along with methods which require some type of investment on your part.

Don’t even think from an instant that this will only work for make money online or internet business/internet marketing – it can work for you in any niche:

• Top 10 Songs
• Top 10 Singles
• Top 10 High Schools
• Top 10 Colleges
• Top 10 Universities
• Top 10 Companies To Work For
• Top 10 Weight Loss Methods
• Top 10 Ways To Engergize Your Mornings
• Top 10 New Years Resolutions
• Top 10 Blogs

And the list can go on and on and on. 

Every item in this list could be expanded upon very easily. 

Take for example Top 10 Companies To Work For.  You could expand upon this list and provide some company data – are they public or private?  If public provide information on their stock, perhaps a who’s who of the company, if you can get information on the different departments they have, perhaps you can track down starting salaries in various departments… you see, there is a lot of information you could add to the post to make it UBER valuable to your visitors.

As with everything, if you decide to use someone elses list ensure you give them credit for the original post – it’s a nice thing to do and spreads good karma.  Besides remember the saying “what goes around, comes around”.

Next time you are struggling to come up with posts for your blog – look around the blogosphere in your niche, or other niches to see what bloggers are up to.  If they have a list, you could borrow the entire list (give credit where it is due) and expand up on the ideas to create unique posts for your blog.  If the list, on their blog, generated a lot of impact (many comments) there is a good chance that it will do the same.

Besides the impact it will generate, you will have several posts that can be distributed over the course of many days thereby captivating, and capturing your visitor to come back for more. 

If the posts are high quality, and present good content – they will be back not only to read the entire series, but will be back for more of the same.  Give them what they want!

Technorati Tags: blog posting ideas, top 10 lists explained

This is a short post…

So like Mo, I’ve got dozens and dozens of feeds in my RSS Reader.  I try to visit most sites on a daily basis (actually I’m obsessive compulsive, especially when it comes to things like e-mail, checking the blogs stats and reading blogs) and I happened to visit Jaarko Laine who is Insanely Interested in Everything.

Whatever.

So anyway, I’m reading, and here is an interesting post entitled “28 Ideas To Spice Up Your Morning” and I’m thinking – this could be cool, besides the early morning <CENSORED> I’ll pick up some other ideas on how to spend the first 8 to 12 hours of my day.

What a disappointment.

Get this, items #1 to 10 involve you doing one thing.  WAKING THE FCUK UP!  I mean WTF kind of advice is this?  Seriously.  I see the word “spice” I’m expecting something… well, spicy.

Number 1 is wake up early.  Ummm…yah, in order to spice up your morning… afternoon… evening… you bloody well better wake up!

Number 2 – take a shower.  Doesn’t everyone?  I guess he assumes that nobody takes showers in the morning.  Well, I guess if you blog for a living you could sit around in your birthday suit… which brings us to number 3, which is (you guessed it) GET DRESSED.  Damn.  Forgot that again.  And look, its 5:30pm.

I honestly don’t get this post at all – and I’m no damn conservative nut job either.

• So what if I don’t get up early?
• What if I don’t take a shower?
• What if I want to walk around in my PJs or birthday suit and blog?

I don’t eat breakfast – guess I’m out of the running on 28 Ways to Spice Up MY Morning… besides he missed “BRUSH YOUR FRIGGIN TEETH” since we’re getting technical on all the other points…

So do you somehow fail if you don’t follow the steps?

This reminds me of the guy from Second City (the television comedy show from years ago), the spaced out guy who would ask…

What is spaced out?  What happens when you’re spaced IN?  How does someone get spaced IN? — Just wish I could remember the show and the character.

Wonder if he was spaced out when writing that post… Jaarko, buddy – what were you thinking???

Anyway… Jaarko has some great posts – but 28 Ideas To Spice Up Your Morning is not one of them.

Technorati Tags: insane, jaarko laine

We are so behind it isn’t funny.  We’ve been working on a better way to create these blog postings for each blog carnival, and yesterday we finally thought we had it right – and it (the PHP code) went and blew up on us.  Not happy campers.  So we had to work it out manually — it’s not a lot of work, but visiting each site takes time and then we tend to get sidetracked and start particpating in that blog.

Also our apologies — in advance — due to some screw ups with Blog Carnival system there are duplicate here… yah, some same stories from last week showed up again this week.  But let me tell you, going through the articles this week – there are some real GEMS in here!

Soooo without any further delays, here is Issue 15 of the Internet Business Blog Carnival.  As promised, next week the regular podcast feature will be back along with our Editors Picks.

• Amanda Moore presents 6 Things That Will Make Me Leave Your Blog posted at VagabondetteVA, saying, “If your blog isn’t reader friendly, they won’t stick around – and they won’t come back.”
• Anya Portnik presents Who cares about Web 2.0?  Sales training & business development tips for the uninitiated posted at Gavin Ingham.
• Anya Portnik presents Achieve Your Goals from Motivate People by motivational speaker Gavin Ingham posted at Gavin Ingham.
• Brian Terry presents Become A Genius Website Designer posted at Big Selling Website Design.
• Brian Terry presents Become a Listbuilding Genius! posted at Big Selling Website Design.
• Carol Bentley presents Interesting result. . . posted at Carol Bentley.
• Cindy King presents Basic Outline For Cross Cultural Online Marketing posted at Get International Clients.
• Cindy King presents Book Review – Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish posted at Cindy King, saying, “Letting Go Of The Words is a must read for anyone involved with a website or blog. This is not about the tools you need or anything technical. This book is about web content and information strategies. It’s about “planning, selecting, organizing, writing, illustrating, reviewing, and testing content”…that gives readers a successful and satisfying web experience.”
• Cindy King presents Buying Logos For International Websites posted at Cindy King, saying, “the search for logos that will please all international clients”
• Colleen M. Johnson presents Blogger Brainstorming posted at cmjoffice.com Blog, saying, “Got blogger block? Ten tips for blog writing.”
• Craig Andrews presents Proper Direct Email Marketing For An Internet Business (Don’t Kill Off Your Email List!) posted at Craig S. Andrews.com.
• Doug presents Live Your Dream Life…TODAY! posted at WAKEshine, saying, “How long does it take to start living your dream life? It may not be as far away as you think.”
• Edith presents Blue Chips Strategy posted at Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act..
• Fred Black presents How to Improve Your Chances of Success by an Infinite Amount posted at Fred Black: Internet Business Blog..
• George Tzenos presents Do You Generate Traffic from Social Bookmarking? posted at Traffic2MyPage Blog.
• Ian Richardson presents EzyAs123 Article Directory Now Open posted at Make Everything EzyAs123, saying, “An Article on internet business”
• Ian Richardson presents Ten Top Strategic Internet Marketing Tips: the expanded version posted at Make Everything EzyAs123, saying, “An article on internet marketing tips.”
• Ian Richardson presents 2. Get Good Search Ranking posted at Make Everything EzyAs123, saying, “An article on how to get good search rankings.”
• Jack S. Keifer presents A Competition Free Internet Business? posted at Jack S. Keifer.
• Jackie presents Talkin’ Bout a Revolution posted at A Keeper’s Jackpot, saying, “A post on how to avoid fees for payment with your online business.”
• John Lenaghan presents What Did You Do For Money When You Were 12? posted at Internet Marketing Chaos.
• John Oh presents Influencer Marketing: Enterprise Model posted at Marketing Joint, saying, “Influencer Marketing: Enterprise Model What exactly is Influencer Marketing? And, why is Influencer Marketing so important? In this post, I’m going to lay out some viewpoints and “answers” using a couple charts I slapped together to illustrate a few key concepts …”
• John W. Furst presents Master Google AdWords Like A Stomper posted at E-Biz Booster Blog, saying, “Andy Jenkins from Stompernet teaches a great deal of ‘doing Google AdWords the smart way’ and nifty, little SEO tricks. The training videos won’t be online forever, act now… [No sales pitch, just free valueable info!]“
• Joshua Seth presents Laptop Charger Travel Tip posted at Joshua Seth Blog.
• Kathleen Gage presents Internet marketing is all about luck….or is it? posted at Street Smarts Marketing & Promotions, saying, “In the last few days I have had conversations with more than one person about their frustration with not selling their products from their website. Their frustration stemmed from the fact they sent out one message, put a product up on their site to sell, or made a blog posting and the flood gates of sales didn’t miraculously open up. ve got news for anyone who thinks sales are going to happen with one contact with their market…IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN. The fact is the process of selling online or driving sales to a consulting business or a brick and mortar business is just that, a process. Learn a process that works.”
• Keith Godorum presents Lock-in $2.99 A Gallon For Gas… posted at Keith Goodrum, saying, “Here is a great example of using a marketing strategy that is not easy to copy. This will allow you to hold a competitive advantage for a longer period of time.”
• Keith Godorum presents Marketing Lessons from Rapper Chamillionaire… posted at Keith Goodrum, saying, “Hip Hop Artist Chamillionaire gives some valuable social marketing advice. In this interview Peter Cashmore he tells what led to his explosive growth in popularity… in spite of not have a major record label promoting his music.”
• Liz presents Are Higher Gas Prices Driving People to Cheat on Their Partners? posted at Nitro Marketing Blog, saying, “This whole “economic crisis” is the best example of “Viral Marketing” I have ever seen. Long before there were actual signs of these dire straits, we were warned they were coming. Viral Marketing has commonly been referred to as “word-of-mouth” advertising…on steroids.”
• Marcus Hochstadt presents I Made $13,692.59 In Profits Last Month, So What? posted at Marcus Hochstadt, saying, “Find out how Marcus Hochstadt makes thousands of dollars online.”
• Martin Russell presents Comedy Wanted Ad posted at Word of Mouth Marketing.
• Matthew Paulson presents Make the Most of Free Online Promotion posted at American Entrepreneurship.
• Melanie presents Word-Of-Mouth Marketing and PR Tips posted at Rembrandt’s PR and Writing Blog for Startup Success, saying, “Learn how to use word-of-mouth marketing and PR to increase sales, credibility and awareness for your business!”
• Michael Law presents How Cell Phone Coupons Have Led to Success for this Internet Startup posted at Michael Emilio, saying, “Learn how this internet business started by a young couple is revolutionizing the world of internet cellphone coupons.”
• Mike Smith presents Small Business Blogging: 10 reasons why its essential to business growth posted at Bootstrapping Blog.
• Patti Blevins presents Home Based Business Opportunity to Work At Home: Please, Please, Please?Watch and Read! posted at pattiblevins.com.
• Peter Tran presents Top Web Site Annoyances posted at Mastery of the Net, saying, “Things to avoid, but unfortunately will never be avoided.”
• Prashant K Shukla presents Site Indexing – Great Eight Tips | My Smart SEO posted at Prashant K Shukla, saying, “Site Indexing – The most effective SEO technique is to index the pages of new website. There are lot of important issues, one should take care. We are providing a simple guide steps to help you in this regard.”
• Prashant K Shukla presents Search Engines or Web Directories | My Smart SEO posted at Prashant K Shukla, saying, “Submitting your site to major search engines and good rank directories help increasing the traffic and good placement in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).”
• Prashant K Shukla presents Role of Meta Title Tag in SEO | My Smart SEO posted at Prashant K Shukla, saying, “Meta tags are the blocks which contain information about the contents of your web page and they exist into the head area of your web page. They are basically meant to communicate with the search engine. The Meta Keywords Tag and Meta Description Tag also need to be taken care of and optimized equally in addition to that of Meta Title Tag to secure a place at the top of the search engines and in convincing a search engine that your site’s contents are more relevant than that of your competitor’s.”
• Prashant K Shukla presents SEO and Meta Tags | My Smart SEO posted at Prashant K Shukla, saying, “SEO and Meta Tags – Meta Tags play significant role in SEO and if we take utmost care in building these tags, result would be the perfect optimization of our website.”
• Raivyn presents 5 Tricks to Earning With Google AdSense posted at Idiot’s Guide to Blogging.
• Raymond presents Blogging And Working As A Temporary Contract Employee Go Well Together posted at Money Blue Book.
• Riggie Freyer presents How to Get Do Follow Links with High Pagerank posted at Internet Business for Beginners | Internet Home Based Business.
• Robert Phillips presents A New Traffic Strategy? posted at CYBERCA$HOLOGY.
• Robert Phillips presents Internet Automation posted at CYBERCA$HOLOGY.
• Roger Smith presents You Inc… Branding Yourself As An Expert In MLM posted at Magnetic Leadership Marketing.
• Roger Smith presents Your MLM Marketing Funnel – 4 Strategies To Put It Completely On Autopilot posted at Magnetic Leadership Marketing.
• Sagar presents 57 Habits of Highly Effective Gmail Users posted at College Degrees.
• Sagar presents Top 25 Most Influential People in the Web Hosting Industry posted at WHDb.
• Sarah Paine presents Three Tips to Ensure Lasting Success posted at Sarah Paine, saying, “Enhance your internet business by implementing these three simple principles.”
• Stefan Töpfer presents THE SMALL BUSINESS BLOG » Blog Archive » Small Business Lists – Start-Up on a Shoestring posted at The Small Business Blog, saying, “A selection of business ideas that can be started with almost zero capital”
• Steve Faber presents - Free Blog Traffic – How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog posted at Home Based Business Success.
• Susan Tatum presents You Have Multiple “Homepages”. Time to Fix Them All. posted at TechnoBuzz.
• Terry Dean presents 7 Step Easy Writing System posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.
• Terry Dean presents Quick Money From Your Internet Skills posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.
• Tim Gary presents “six-pack” follow up – dang if it doesn’t work like it should! posted at Internet Success Bites.
• Tim Gary presents Your Mental Nooks and Crannies Hold the Keys to Success posted at Internet Success Bites.
• WM Media presents How to Build a Website If You Don?t Know HTML posted at Buy And Sell Websites, saying, “Even if you don’t know HTML, you can still build a very nice website.”
• Woman Tribune presents I am Addicted to Entrecard posted at Woman Tribune.
• cryton presents This Blog Got Mentioned on WFMU by Bronwyn C. See? There is Something Good in Jersey posted at Welcome Back Rosenthal, saying, “Why using old media to generate traffic with your new media project is a good idea.”
• debbie presents Make Money From Writing… Like Us! posted at Empowering Mom.

…btw, FCUK is not a “bad” word (as Mos’ son would say) – it stands for French Connection UK – the fashion house.  We just love using the word because it makes us feel bad.

Technorati Tags: Blog Carnival, blog carnivals, internet business blog, internet business blog carnival

Video Blogging or vlogging is the buzzword of the day.

But video blogging is not new.  It’s been around since 2005, however as the technology (used to record videos) has improved it has opened the doors to more individuals.  You can get high quality digital video records that you can take with you for under $200.00 – combined with the portability a laptop offers plus wireless internet connections and internet cafes everywhere — you can be in constant contact with your blog (or vlog).

So where did video blogging start?  Where did it originate from?  WHO was the first video blogger?

Significant Events in the Development of Video Blogs

• 2003, May 22 – Maurizio Dovigi, an Italian journalist, launches No Filter, the first European vlog.
• 2003, June 15 – Nacho Durán launches the first (known) South American (Sao Paulo, Brazil) videoblog based on soundless loops made out of sequences of pictures daily taken from a portable webcam.
• 2004, January 1 – Steve Garfield launches his videoblog and declares that 2004 would be the year of the video blog.
• 2004, June 1 – Peter Van Dijck and Jay Dedman start the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, which becomes the center of a community of vloggers
• 2005, January – Vloggercon, the first videoblogger conference, is held in New York City.
• 2005, July 20 – The Yahoo! Videoblogging Group grows to over 1,000 members.
• 2006, July – YouTube has become the 5th most popular web destination, with 100 million videos viewed daily, and 65,000 new uploads per day.
• 2006, July 5 – Host Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom over differences with her business partner Andrew Baron.
• 2006, November – The Vloggies, the first annual videoblogging awards, is held in San Francisco.
• 2007, May and August – The Wall Street Journal places a grandmother on the front page of its Personal Journal section.  In August she is featured on an ABC World News Tonight segment[20] showing the elderly now becoming involved in the online video world.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlog

What is a Video Blog?

A Video Blog (or VLOG) can  be described, simply, as postings of videos on a website which encourages comments from the audience.  Though traditional blogs are designed to encourage comments, with VLOGS participation is required even more since the comments will tell the story behind the video and will encourage other visitors to the site to view the video and participate.

Video logs (vlogs) also often take advantage of web syndication to allow for the distribution of video over the Internet using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats, for automatic aggregation and playback on mobile devices and personal computers.

What do Vlogs Offers than Blogs Don’t?

A vlog helps you to communicate with the audience and they can actually see the expressions on your face and hear the voice.  You can build a one-to-one relationship with your audience.  Why do you think the TV is so addictive?  Someone who is charismatic or even butt ugly will command attention – surely you must remember William Hung who was on American Idol from the third season of the television program?

William Hung Commands a Cult Following

Hung rapidly gained a cult following. A William Hung fan site, set up by realtor Don Chin and his wife Laura, recorded over four million hits within its first week. Hung subsequently appeared on several television programs including Jimmy Kimmel, On Air with Ryan Seacrest, Entertainment Tonight, The Late Show With David Letterman, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Howard Stern Radio Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dateline NBC, Arrested Development and CBS’s The Early Show. Hung was featured in several national magazines and newspapers; he was parodied on Saturday Night Live and appeared on Celebrity Deathmatch. He was reportedly invited to perform at MTV’s Asia Awards held in mid-February. Remixes of Hung’s audition performance topped song request lists at a number of radio stations. An online petition to get Hung back to American Idol included more than 100,000 signatures by late February. Hung was brought back to American Idol as part of a mid-season special titled Uncut, Uncensored and Untalented, airing March 1, 2004. The special documented what it was like to experience the audition process and, in Hung’s case, emerge as an inadvertent celebrity. Hung has become more famous than many American Idol contestants, being arguably one of the worst singers to grace the American Idol audition stage.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hung

William went on to get a record deal, and appearances in television, commercials and movies!

That’s the power of TV and that’s the same power that vloggers are looking to cash in on.

Lets look at another viral video that can be found on YouTube – I’m sure there are many other examples, but this one always sticks in my mind – the infamous “fat guy sings Numa Numa”.  The Numa Numa video has had over 13,000,000 (yes, that 13 MILLION) views and over 74,000 ratings! 

Here’s the video, for your enjoyment:

That’s the power behind vlogging.

Before you jump into vlogging, are you sure you can easily convey your feelings?  You need to appear natural when vlogging.  With blogging you could “fake it” — but you can’t with a vlog.  So for a general blog, you can write about a topic using keywords to draw attention while for a video blog the video does it all – but it’s not just the video, it is the person behind the video.

I’ve seen some very entertaining videos, and others that are trying — but are faking it… yes, I know I said you can’t but these enterprising individuals certainly were able to!  They were dry, and lifeless.  The text was obviously scripted — which might be fine, but they spoke in monotone.  Boring.  I left the site as quickly as I arrived.

Video Blogs are ideal for news journalism. It is wonderful tool for delivering content like television content, and the list is never ending. Video Blogs help you to share the enthusiasm present in the content. This is revolutionary as before it was a quibble with words but now it is reality in the making.

John Chow, who is currently in China vlogs on his traditional blog on a regular basis.  The posts are entertaining and give you insight into life in another part of the world first-hand.

Here are a few posts from John Chows’ blog:

• Mercedes Benz Shopping in Suzhou, China
• Dinner With a Suzhou Reader
• Hello from Suzhou, China

Another prolific video blogger is Vic over at Blogger Unleashed.  Here are some notable posts from Vic:

• Ranking Keyword Video Tutorial
• Serious Look at Why Readers Subscribe to a Feed
• and of course the controversial post Another DumbFuck is Born LMAO

Video Blogs help you to keep close to your family when you are away from home. You can share your infant’s first babble or the first steps with your parents. Nowadays reaching out through video blogging is easy and hassle free.  Forget sitting down the family to watching slides, or videos at home – post them to your personal website and let friends and family from around the world view them when they want.

Although we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves here – you really need to know what is a good camera and microphone to use plus some other neat tips and tricks, we’ll go over some Free Places to Host and Post Your Videos.  Videos can eat up bandwidth pretty damn quick – you certainly don’t want to host them on your site.  The most notable places to host are YouTube, and Yahoo Video – but there are many other solutions out there and we’ll present you with some great sites.

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