Here’s another short (one minute!) video from the folks at Common Craft that explains how to use Reader as well:

Related posts on this site:

Blogging and Podcasting Workshop

How Much Should I Charge for My Advertising Space?

Photo by rbatina

Public relations (PR) in the world of new media (blogging, podcasting) doesn’t work the same as it has for the print world. When you did something noteworthy in the old days, you’d write up a press release and send it to the relevant media outlets: newspapers, radio, TV, etc. That doesn’t work any more. In Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, co-authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel write:

…a large number of people see the PR practitioner intentionally blocking the path to the truth, someone who guides company spokespeople to manipulate the message around the actual facts to the advantage of the company and at the expense of the public’s right to know (100).

And it’s no wonder: we’ve suffered from so much spin and message-massaging in the last two decades that we’ve simply come to expect it. So if you’ve got something to say or want someone’s help, what’s the alternative in a post-press-release age?

Have a blogging strategy

The blogosphere is a free market for information: the best, most valuable stuff rises to the top while the dregs remain at the bottom. Because people have become accustomed to filtering spin, they can tell when they’re reading a credible site or not. It won’t do to send out a bunch of press releases to top blogs and podcasts. If you’re looking for positive press in the blogosphere, then, you have to work within the rules of new media, not old.

Tim Ferriss, author of the bestselling The 4-Hour Workweek (review forthcoming), did just that. He cultivated relationships with influential bloggers for a year prior to publishing his book. When the book came out, he asked those same bloggers if he could send them review copies. They said, "Sure," and his book was well-received (Robert Scoble has all the details of Ferriss’ strategy in a new FastCompany article).

New media means new rules.

Tags: blogging, marketing, new media

Photo by fragglerawker_03

Making money on the Internet is easy. I think I’ve made close to $30–without hardly lifting a finger–in two years. Which leads us to this truth:

Making a lot of money on the Internet is hard.

Without an effective strategy, you won’t be earning a living from your online experiences. Essentially, there are three methods for generating revenue:

• Sell advertising
• Use affiliate links
• Sell a product

These are a few of the best articles I’ve found that discuss the nuts and bolts of these methods:

• The Three Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Website
• How to Make Money From Your Blog
• Making Money on the Internet

For day-to-day reading, these three four sites are, hands down, the best resources for would-be blogger/podcaster entrepreneurs:

• Copyblogger
• The Business of Podcasting and New Media
• ProBlogger
• doshdosh (added with Jacob’s recommendation)

Throw these into your feed reader and absorb.

What is it?  Alltop is a kind of aggregator of all the top (all the top–get it?) news feeds on the Internet.  They’ve piped in news from sites in nearly forty different categories (for example, career, food, health, fashion, celebrities, etc.) and update the feeds every ten minutes.

Who would use it?  Good question.  If you’re comfortable with managing your own RSS feeds, you already know that you should be using Google Reader (or some other aggregator).  If you’re not comfortable with that, Alltop collects all the good stuff without your intervention.  Unlike Google Reader, though, you can’t customize the sources that Alltop pulls in.  But it is a good way to discover some sites that you might want to throw into Reader.

Who’s behind Alltop? Guy Kawasaki and a couple of his friends.

Bottom line: A painless way for technophobes and newbies to get the benefits of RSS without the heavy lifting.  For RSS addicts, you’ll need to bookmark the site–there’s no RSS feed .

We mentioned several web sites that you could use to discover and manage blog and podcast feeds.  For your convenience, they are listed here.

Blog Tools

• Google Blogsearch
• Google (just add "blog" along with your keywords)
• Technorati
• Technorati Top 100 Blogs
• Google Reader

Podcast Tools

• Podcast Alley
• Podcast Pickle
• iTunes software (free download)

During the presentation, I also showed three short videos on blogs, RSS, and using iTunes to subscribe to podcasts.  The last one, "Getting Started with Google Reader," wasn’t shown in the presentation but it’s an excellent step-by-step tutorial for beginners. Those videos can be accessed below. 

Blogs in Plain English via CommonCraft

RSS in Plain English via CommonCraft

iTunes Get Podcasts via Apple

Getting Started with Google Reader via Capture the Conversation

Tags: blogging, podcasting, tutorial

If you’re interested in all the mundane details of my life, you can follow them with twitter or just watch the "status" updates in facebook.

Tags: twitter, blogging

Photo by David D Muir

James Farmer is selling his two-and-a-half year old blog consulting business, Blogsavvy.  Bidding starts at $5,000 but he’ll sell it to you–today–for the bargain price of only $10,000.  Given that he’s making about $2,000/month in consulting income, that’s a pretty quick payback for any business.

Originally via ProBlogger.

Tags: blogging