Create your blog

Blog Master Joda Yaro Starak has done a great job again, and is about to launch the Become a Blogger mentoring program for both beginner and intermediate level bloggers. As an introduction of the program, he released free video tutorials in conjunction with his partner Gideon Shalwick. You may find below the links to these free tutorial videos. I strongly suggest you to join their early notification list by clicking here Become a Blogger. Their free report will be available by December 1.

Deal with information overload

As the amount of information flowing into the blogosphere grow, there is also a growing need for tools and principles that help bloggers focus their attention on what should be the most relevant information for them. In this post I would like to share my own ways of dealing with information overload as a problogger.

Hack Google

Google

Google is one of the most effective tool to filter information. I use it effectively for my blogging Google requirements. I command my blogging with iGoogle, and create my own blogging archive with Google Notebook. If I need to share some documents with my blogging buddies, I use Google Documents. Both Google and Google Blog Search are quite useful for my blogging.

As a WordPress fan I use plugins every single day. I constantly try new plugins to manage my time and daily blogging more effectively. Here are the top 6 plugins that I like most. You may check them out and see if they fit you too.

• All In One SEO: This plugin optimizes your blog titles for search engines, generates META tags automatically, and avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs. What else can I add? If you don’t use it, believe me you will miss a lot.

Some bloggers use Twitter to promote their blogs, or use it separately in order to gain more followers.  However, majority of them don’t effectively use the service for what it was intended, so here are a few tips on how to effectively manage using Twitter.

• Ask your readers to follow your tweets either via your email newsletter, or an invitation text & link on your blog.
• Use WordPress plugins like TwitterTools to update your tweets on your blog.
• Participate in the communities within your niche which will naturally draw followers to you. Define your target niche, and eliminate the rest. Follow less but targeted people.
• Don’t be too noisy. Keep the noise down. Do not follow noisy people, just purge those people.
• Star your favorite tweets. This will help you to save them for future use.
• Watch Tao of Twitter by Ed Dale.
• Prefer easy to use twittering tools like Twshot or TwitterFox
• Your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed. Check the bottom of your Twitter homepage, and you will notice your Twitter RSS feed. Get your Twitter RSS feed, and send it to RSS directories.
• Customize your Twitter background image. Look at mine: Mert Erkal. It is not so difficult. Believe me it is worth spending your time. Do not forget to publish your blog’s logo and URL for branding.
• Integrate your Twitter updates with Facebook using TwitterSync. This little application will publish your latest tweet as your Facebook status.
• If you have time, I suggest you to take a look at Caroline Middlebrook’s Twitter Guide.

How do you use Twitter? Please share your best practices with me.

Become A Problogger

I quit my job last July, and become a problogger. Many readers are still asking me how I managed to quit my full time marketing job after 10 years, while still paying a serious monthly mortgage debt. In this post I would like to share the key turning points in my blogging career.

• Joined Blog Mastermind: I joined Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind blog mentoring program in August 2008. It was a paid program, and I nearly paid $400 for 6 months. Now I see that it was a wise decision to enroll the program. I learned a lot from Yaro’s course. He gave me a very solid road map to blogging success.