Danger Quicksand: Have A Nice Day pre-order now!

The already heavily downloaded and very well received career management and business survival manual Danger Quicksand: Have A Nice Day, written by my good friend David St. Lawrence of Ripples, is now available for pre-order.

Note that I have placed an order button, on my blog sidebar, to help with your book pre-order.

Beat the rush and move to the head of the line, and have your own copy of this tremendous business book on your shelf.

It's definitely a keeper.

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Blogs equal SEO power in searches

Blogs have tremendous SEO value.

They are truly search engine optimization powerhouses.

Before your eyes glaze over, and you start to yawn, keep in mind that many of your brand new blog visitor traffic arrives from search engines. These include Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, and A9.com.

Ranking well, and preferably on the first page, is key to gaining extra free visitor traffic. Being placed on the second page for a search isn't too bad either.

By way of an SEO blog example, here are some search results for Blog Business World for uber competitive keywords.

We'll examine the search for the two word phrase "business world" without the quotes.

On Google, this blog ranks #8 out of an incredibly mind boggling 158,000,000 returns. You read that correctly. 158 million search results.

Okay, I'm not number on on page one. Of course, ranking just behind the BBC and the World Bank isn't too shabby.

Blog Business World is slightly less well ranked on Yahoo at #19, and is located on page two.

Of course, Yahoo search returns total an even more incredible 270,000,000 linked sites.

Yes, that is 270 million returns for the search term "business world".

In terms of SEO, those are very powerful returns indeed.

Note the power of a little old blog, in competition with those extremely wealthy and huge organizations.

If you ever doubted the search engine optimization power of a blog before, that might just change your mind.

A blog oozes SEO power.

Get a blog working in the search engines for your business today.

There is no cheaper or more effective SEO available.

Anywhere, at any price.

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Blog traffic: Length of visitor stays

Blog visitor traffic is composed of several components.

Along with numbers of visitors, their entry page to the blog, and whether the blog was accessed from a search engine or an external link, is the matter of how long a visitor stays at the blog.

Research conducted by my good friend Darren Rowse of the must read Pro Blogger has determined that the average visitor remains at a blog for all of 96 seconds.

That's an entire minute and a half.

That's not very long.

After a study of 350 blogs (or 25% of the total) at The Truth Laid Bear traffic ranking page, Darren discovered that blog visits end in literally a few short seconds.

While there are shortcomings in the data base, including the fact that the The Truth Laid Bear uses only publicly available visitor statistics from Site Metervisitor counter.

Other visitor counters, including the ones that I use, are not taken into account.

The average time of 96 seconds could possibly be a statistical error.

For example, if one person earns a $1 million per year, and the others earn $0, the average is $100,000 per year. As you can see, averages are very misleading. A better statistic is the median, where 50% of stays are longer than say 96 seconds, and 50% of stays are of shorter duration.

Since the major A-List bloggers probably have thousands of visitors that simply click over to check for updates, stay 10 seconds or less and then leave, those short stays would receive far more weight. One 10 minute stay on a low traffic blog would be overwhelmed in the “average length” calculation by quick clicks to the Top 100 blogs.

That said, the study teaches some very valuable lessons for bloggers.

The writer must engage the visitor immediately or risk that reader from clicking away to a more interesting blog. As Darren correctly says, get to the point of the post, and keep the message simple. If not, the visitor is long gone to the next blog or website.

The volume of work done by Darren Rowse, and the results found, are very interesting. The research Darren has undertaken is to be taken seriously by everyone who maintains a blog of any type.

Darren also offers some suggestions for further blogging research:

Questions and areas for further research

- Does blog design/loading time impact the the length of stay?
- Does blog topic impact the length of stay?
- Do bloggers from certain countries (with high local readership) have different lengths of stay?
- Does posting length have an impact?
- How are News Aggregators impacting length of stay?
- How do these figures compare with other websites that are not blogs?


Bloggers would be well advised to capture their visitors' attention immediately, or risk losing them possibly forever.

Short attention spans are the rule in the blogosphere.

Ignore them at your own peril.

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Blog posts: Don't lose them

Lost blog posts.

You have probably felt the pain, and perhaps even kicked chairs, and screamed loudly enough to frighten the neighbours about it.

A post is written in the blogging post window, you smile at its artistic merit, highly polished writing, and recall the work of adding all of the hot links.

You hit the post button...

...and nothing happens, but an error message on the screen.

In frustration, you click the back button, and a look of horror crosses your face.

Various words, not appropriate for a family blog, leave your lips in a torrent.

The posting window is now blank once again.

All of that work of writing is now lost forever.

Don't let this nightmare happen to you.

Users of the Blogger system are all too aware of the all too frequent problem of losing posts. Yes, I know, I know, I use Blogger, but for some inexplicable reason I enjoy the challenges.

I guess everyone needs a hobby!

Other blogging tools are equally as likely to send your post of the year award winner into the ill defined nether regions of cyberspace as well.

Some solutions and precautions are necessary to prevent the blog post losses.

One option is to write the post in Notepad, or similar text editor, and save the work.

The weakness of this technique, of course, is creating the links. Each link has to be written in clean html code, and as a result, errors creep into the post. That equals dead and non-working links.

Very un-reader friendly.

A solution to the html coding issue is to write one link, copy and paste it as required, for each subsequent link. Change the internal link URL, and the link anchor text that appears on the clickable link as required.

Another option, and one that I use (mostly), is to copy the entire post from the posting window just prior to clicking the post button.

If the publishing fails, and the back button method is used, the newly blank page can be immediately refilled.

Rinse and repeat.

A combination of the two methods can be used as well.

Write the post in the blogging window. Copy the entire post to Notepad, and save it there for posterity.

Click the publishing button, and lost posts can be immediately retrieved from the Notepad files.

In any case, make certain that you make a pre-publishing backup.

Just in case.

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Carnival of the Vanities at Bird's Eye View

The 130th edition of the longest running internet blog carnival, the well known Carnival of the Vanities, is up at the well known political blog Bird's Eye View.

Carnival of the Vanities is the original collection of blog postings, assembling some of the best and wide ranging bloggers on the internet.

Post topics
include politics, literature, science, medicine, technology, business, culture, and some satire.

I have an entry in this week's Carnival of the Vanities.

My entry post is entitled "Connecting With Others Through Citizen Publishing" where I discuss how technology makes the publishing world smaller and more accessible to the individual.

To participate in the Carnival of the Vanities, or any of the other blog carnivals, one of the easiest techniques is to use the all inclusive carnival entry form at The Conservative Cat.

Another participation option is to simply e-mail your entry to the host of the week.

That's what I do.

I have the honour of hosting Carnival of the Vanities right here at Blog Business World on Wednesday, June 1, 2005.

As I suggest elsewhere, hosting and contributing to the various internet blog carnivals is a great promotional idea for your blog.

Next week's edition of Carnival of the Vanities will be at Dr. Boyle's award winning medical blog called CodeBlueBlog.

In the meantime, head on over the Bird's Eye View hosting of Carnival of the Vanities and enjoy the posts on offer.

You will almost certainly be introduced to some great new blogs.

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