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This Guest Post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services. To get your own guest post on Mixed Market Arts, please visit the Guest Post page.

There are millions of blogs out there, so how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are proven methods you can use to raise your blog’s profile, but it will take months of good solid work - and it starts before you have even written the first post.

Optimization

The news is nearly a month old, but Forbes is still only sending out private email invitations about their new project. I had originally heard about it when there were few details about it, but I have found a few new updates and thought I would share my findings and opinions. Lets get started with some details…

Who?
Forbes, the business & financial news powerhouse

What?
Forbes is launching a business and financial blog network

When?
Forbes plans to launch it sometime this month

My Akismet has just blocked the 1000th spam comment on my blog. Akismet is easily the most important plugin you can have on your blog. Without Akismet, I would have spent hours reading and deleting those emails, and moderating all of the comments.  I have received 748 actual comments and over 1000 spammy comments.  This means I would have had to spend more than twice as much time approving and deleting all of the comments without the plugin. If you are not yet using Akismet, grab it now.

From Their Site:

One very large problem that a lot of blogs have (or will soon have) to deal with automated blogs that steal your blog posts and post them on their blog. The process is entirely automated and a great post that takes you three hours to write, they duplicate in 5 seconds. If Google would then view their blog before yours, they would rank higher in Google and your blog would get penalized for duplicate content!