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With the dawn of the internet, more people are resorting to the web to find their daily dose of news, but for those of you whom are internet marketers and still buy print magazines, you can get a holiday discount on the Search Marketing Standard. The discount coupon code lets you sign up for one full year (4 issues) for only $4.95,  66% off retail price.  The coupon is from Search Engine Guide. For less than $1.25 per issue, I figured I would take the risk. If I read anything I like, I will let everyone know in a future blog post.

A little over a month ago I donated a business idea to the Business Idea of the Day and they donated a $400 laptop in my name. The idea that I donated was that someone should make a free online reference (Wikipedia competitor) that ran on a few small advertisements rather than donations. Unlike Wikipedia, the site idea would be for-profit, and would share 60% of the revenue with 6 of the writers per page. This would net 40% revenue from the ads on every single page of the website. Writers would be inclined to write and research the pages because they would get a profit from it.

One very simple tip that I overlooked when I first started blogging was to place a feedreader icon in the address bar for Firefox users.

A lot of old wordpress themes do not have this set as the standard, so if your rss feed does not show up in the address bar, make sure to add the one line of code to your blog. For demonstration purposes, I included the html code for you:
<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS feed” href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/MixedMarketArts” />

Mixx is a brilliantly designed and developed social news aggregator that displays news related to your interests and the topics are voted on by the community. I am a big supporter of Mixx because it is like the currently popular Digg site, but features a much nicer system and has the potential to become much bigger than Digg. Digg has tons of faults, which has resulted in a mass movement of long time Digg supporters flocking over to Mixx. Right now Mixx is still only a few months old (since their public beta) and is growing rapidly. If you have not yet already, now is the perfect time to test the waters and if it is something you enjoy, become a founding member. I am not a fan of Digg because great stories can get buried for no good reasons, and excellent stories do not always hit the frontpage. In my opinion, the top 10% of Digg users control 90% of the site. With Mixx, even an average-Joe can hit the frontpage with a few keywords that do not have a super wide audience, and on the opposite end of that scale is that the big sites can benefit a lot by landing on the homepage for some big “tech news” keywords. Mixx is for everyone, and unlike Digg, does not focus solely on the tech-savvy users. They have already made landing deals with Reuters, LA times, and many more providers and I expect we will see lots more in the coming months.I also love Mixx because I find a lot of great blog posts on it, a few of which have inspired me to make blog posts about. If you are a blogger yourself, you may find lots of inspiration with Mixx.Now is your chance to get in on the Mixx movement early so that when the site has taken a big market share away from Digg, your account will have lots of karma to help you get your greatest posts promoted.  Update: A Mixx staff member left a comment saying that karma does not affect ranking, only votes.

This is a guest post from Sharon Hurley Hall from PiggyBankPie.com Writing Services.

A blog is an easy way to make money online. You can make money from syndicating the content you have written, from contextual advertising and from promoting affiliate products. However, in order to do any of these things and to be truly successful, you need to attract visitors to your blog and raise your blog’s profile. One easy way to do this is by using blog carnivals.

What Are Blog Carnivals?

One of the best ways to network with other bloggers, build links, and increase your website traffic is to comment on the blog posts for all of the blogs that you read on a daily basis. Blogging is a dictatorship where one voice does all the talking, and the readers do the listening. The comment section is the one place where anyone can voice their opinion and be rewarded for it. Now there are many ways to build search engine friendly links through blog commenting through dofollow blog search engines, but something that is commonly overlooked is that the blog owner is the one who has to moderate the comments that get accepted and denied. I always use “Collin LaHay” now when I comment on other people’s blogs because it increases the chance of getting that comment approved by about 300%. If you take a look at my top commentators section, you can see that nearly all of them have their actual name. If someone was an avid commenter on my blog and used the name “Mesothelioma Cancer Lawyer” or “Buy Viagra Online”, I would most likely not allow my blog to give followed links to those individuals. By commenting with your actual name, not only do you have improved chances of getting accepted, but you still receive backlinks and you further brand yourself which is better in the long run. Another problem that I have seen is adding your link as a signature in your blog posts. Whenever I see this in a comment, I immediately remove the link or else deny the comment. Your name is already linking to your website, there is no reason to post the same link again. I have had a few people already do this in the past, but I will keep their names private. My new comment policy to receive search engine followed links in my top commentators plugin is that you must not be keyword stuffing your links, and that your comments must be beneficial to the post (This has not been a problem for me, but I see a lot of blogs with it).

This is the 15th part of The Link Building Cookbook series showing you the best places to build links to increase website traffic.

This is the 14th part of The Link Building Cookbook series showing you the best places to build links to increase website traffic.

Update: Upon further inspection, the script loads itself from an IFrame, so the links will not pass as much PR, but you can still use this technique to increase website traffic. I had originally checked the google cache to see if the links were saved, but I later found out that Google grabs the most recent code if the cached page requests an iframe.