Blogger
What Color Is Your Hat – Black, Blue, Gray Or White?
Many people wear hats of different shapes and colors in their lives. While most parents and business owners might just consider those hats to be a necessary part of a work outfit or a fashion statement, on the Internet, specifically with Internet marketing, they have a very different meaning.
Knowing the differences between the “hat” colors and the risks you take when you chose one over the other will help keep you out of Google death as you attempt to manipulate search engines. Google has a very short tolerance for unethical practices that attempt to work around their rules.
It is commonly agreed upon that the safest techniques to follow in your marketing campaigns are the White Hat strategies. If you remember the old cowboy movies where the hero always wore the white hat and triumphed over the bad guys who wore black hats, you will see the implied differences in hat colors.
White Hat
A marketer using white hat techniques is not malicious in intent or actual practice. They follow business practices that are considered ethical and acceptable by the industry and do nothing that could be considered spamming others. They are not trying to find and exploit loopholes in the systems.
Grey Hat
Practices start veering off the benign white hat techniques when marketers start pushing the edges of legality and use somewhat shady methods to get what they want on other sites or to get around Google’s rules. Some of these techniques used might be reverse engineering of copyrighted or trademarked software, or copying small sections of articles and passing them off as their own. They may have found a loophole that will be closed once Google figures out what they are doing.
Blue Hat
This term is used by firms involved in computer security and refers to hackers hired to unearth bugs in a system before it is launched. When the blue hat hackers find unprotected areas of a client’s security, they quickly close the hole in the company’s software or report it to the security team.
Black Hat
A black hat can be a person who breaks computer security without permission to vandalize a site, steal credit card information, steal identities or pirate another marketer’s proprietary information or processes. A black hat marketer is someone who participates in illegal ways of getting better search engine rankings including keyword stuffing, spamdexing, spam linking, scraped content and article spinning of copyrighted material, hidden website links, excessive cross-linking, etc., that is for rank gain rather than for a better user experience.
Again, it is usually better to keep your White Hat on or you’ll always be looking over your shoulder for the Google police. If you’re wearing a Black Hat, you may find yourself with a spike in results, but it won’t last and is not a steady income you can count on.
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Savvy Blogging Techniques Webinar
Join me this April 12 at 5PM Pacific Standard Time for Savvy Blogging Techniques, by Sharyn Abbott, the Founder of UBU (Ultimate Business University) spent 9 months testing and retesting blog formats, Widgets, Plugins and platforms before she discovered, “there is a formula to get your blog to the top ranking”. Sharyn has 28 blogs, all are in the top 1% of all websites in the world, and in 4 weeks, yours can be too!
With Sharyn; walk through every step it takes to make your blog live, effective and generate high volumes of traffic. Imagine having your website in the top 5% of all websites in the world! Can you understand how getting in the top page results of search engines will gain you more clients to your site?
Some of the areas covered include:
- Appearance – which style to use
- How to design pages
- Which Widgets & Plugins you”ll want to add & how to install them
- How often and how to add posts
- How to add audio How to add video
- How to get back links that really count
- How to generate volumes of traffic
- What you need to create a call to action
For more information about this even, please see my original post at The Ultimate Info site:
http://theultimateinfo.com/2011/opportunity/april12-savvy-blogging-techniques/ where you can collect your free VIP pass to attend this valuable webinar event!
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Amazing free photo subscription offer for Bloggers
I’m SO excited to tell you about this special offer from Fotolia. Bloggers can get a free subscription with up to 5 downloads per day at Fotolia. What an offer! This is the ideal time to check out Fotolia for your image needs, for a full month – absolutely free!
Fotolia offers the largest image bank of free and most affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print. I’ve been browsing their selection of photos, illustrations and vectors for a few days now and I’m so pleased with the quality and selection they offer. There is so much to choose from! Fotolia on Facebook offers free daily downloads as well!
Fotolio has some pretty neat apps too. Fotolia Desktop Widget is a convenient way to search for stock images, vector and videos on your desktop with slick and intuitive drag and drop interface. The Fotolia Plug-In instantly adds high-resolution photos, videos and illustrations to your Microsoft Office PowerPoint or Word documents. Very handy!
All images offered on Fotolia are Royalty free, and can be used for all kinds of professional documents with no limit on time or copies:
- Creation of advertising media
- Creation of professional documents
- Illustration of press articles
- Illustration of websites, blogs, newsletters, web banners…
- Illustration multimedia documents
- Illustration / Decorations on TV shows or movies
- Creation of derivative products (Extended license)
Do you Blog? If yes, then you shoud get in touch with Fotolia and get your subscription started today. This is too great an offer to pass up! More info at http://fotolianews.com
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CSS Feb Quickstart Class
Does HTML code stress you out? Would you like to learn more about CSS so you can customize your themes or WordPress blog? You can buy a book, or enroll in a semester class, but I’ve got something better for you!
Lynette Chandler is hosting a free two-day, weekend quickstart class designed to help you get to know CSS quickly so you can put your new skills to work the following Monday! Now I’ve taken html and css classes before, but I know the benefit of a good refresher class and I’m registered to attend! This class is going to be very useful for anyone who is interested in editing their own sites or blogs and especially great for those who are new to web design or want to fully grasp CSS for their own editing or helping others with their wordpress issues.
This class will be held Friday, February 18th for one hour in the evening and Saturday, February 19th for three hours with breaks and lunch hour in between.
This is a great opportunity for:
- Beginner virtual assistants
- Anyone who’s beginning to offer web development services and SEO
- VA’s who want better grasp at CSS and stop wasting time on trial and error tweaks
- Business owners who want to have their people trained for them
Register and attend for a better understanding of HTML and CSS.
Click here for more details. You’ll be glad you did.
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Easy photo grab tutorial
Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Or, you can take a look at some of the useful reviews and tutorials my friend Lynette shares on her TechBasedMarketing.com/blog. She shares informative reviews, time saving computer tips and really helpful video tutorials.
Now, I’m a big fan of the WordPress platform and use it on several of my sites (including this one) and I appreciate useful, quality plugins – like the one Lynette explains in this tutorial below. It’s the Grab & Save plugin and I think you’ll agree that it really helps to expedite the whole blogging with photos process.
Have fun blogging!
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New Year Not doing Nothing
.. what that means is… Despite it looking a little quiet around here, I’ve actually been quite busy – especially since the start of this new year. I have been designing, editing, blogging, blogging, editing and designing.. some of my favorite things in life!
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I’ve totally redesigned the look and content (again!!) of wahmbuds.com. This time with my own custom graphic design and maybe I’ll stick with this theme design this time, who knows. Naw.. I’ll probably have something totally new by Valentines. ?[/third]
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I was going to sell this site but changed my mind. I’m so glad I did too. I enjoy the mom content (new blogging here too) on this site and it’s been around for a while now (2004). I think all it needed was a new look. YeahMom! Can you say PINK?[/third]
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I just recently started creating custom designed wordpress themes. I’m rather happy with this custom design I did for LP&P. I updated the site with new posts too.. I know it was feeling very lonely there for a while. Yes, my website have feelings – don’t yours!?[/third]
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This site is easily my most posted on site.. mainly because I feel a little more liberal with it, posting more daily, life and fun stuff. It too got a new design and plenty of blogging. Also added a Good Reads widget here, great book/read tracking site.[/third]
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MomsRewards.com – my oldest site (2000) saw a little bit of a face-lift with a new main image on the front page, a new design on it’s rewards blog and some new quality freebies of course. I’m happy to report it’s been seeing a lot of new visitors lately too. [/third]
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I just get around to this site as often as I would really like to. Maybe this is something I can change for 2011. I did however, spend a good amount of quality time with this site just this morning, blogging about my favorite teachers blogs.[/third]
Also, worked on some custom graphic designs for a client and updated my design portfolio and paid some attention to AnotherBabyBoomer.com and Wahmiam.com with new blog posts.
It’s been a good couple of weeks at home on holiday vacation being able to get these updates done. I did manage to get up from my desk once in a while and eat, sleep, visit the gym, visit relatives and enjoy some quality family time playing many many rounds of Scene It too.
Wishing you a happy and fulfilling new year 2011 too!
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