The 150^th edition of the longest running internet blog carnival, the well known Carnival of the Vanities, is up at the Japan based international politics and motorcycle blog known as Riding Sun.

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

This week's Carnival of the Vanities entries include politics, literature, science, medicine, technology, business, culture, comedy, and sports.

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

My entry is titled "Visitor logs: Goldmines for you" where I discuss the many ways that reading your visitor traffic reports can help you with posting ideas (among other things), and to gain more readers for your blog.

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 usually do.

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 the news, politics, music, and general interest blog known as Generic Confusion.

In the meantime, head on over to the Riding Sun hosting of Carnival of the Vanities and enjoy the posts on offer.

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

Tags: Carnival of the Vanities, blogging, carnivals, promotions.

READ MORE - Carnival of the Vanities at Riding Sun

A business blog component as part of every online business is one of my main SEO recommondations. Because of the search engine power of business blogs, it's a natural addition for every website.

One of my SEO clients, Green Mountain at Fox Run has now taken the business blogging plunge.

Their new healthy weight loss blog is called, appropriately enough A Weight Lifted, and it's already gaining some attention around the blogosphere. Their traffic is steadily increasing, and sending visitors over to the main women's weight loss spa website.

A Weight Lifted was developed on a TypePad blogging platform, and is a multiple contributor group blog. That multi-person approach to blogging is working well for them.

The three main authors are posting regularly, and they are contributing posts to a number of the internet Carnivals. As a result, the blog is gaining a wider reading audience. The blog has also been submitted to the various blog directories, and to some mainstream internet directories as well.

We have also made certain that the blog is available via the various RSS feed aggregators. Ease of feed subscription was a must, and RSS was addressed early in the blog development process.

The purpose of the blog, from a business blogging perspective, was to develop a conversation and informal relationship with the readership. Building a trusting relationship, through open and frank discussion of weight and health issues, was a very important consideration for the writers. They have maintained a firm committment to their principles and that is expected to continue.

The SEO consideration of the blog was a very distant secondary consideration behind the more important relationship building aspect of the blog. Conversation and interaction was the primary blogging goal.

Green Mountain at Fox Run already has strong search engine rankings, and rapidly exploding visitor traffic as a result. The blog was not required for that purpose.

Instead, the blog puts real people in the business.

No longer just a website, or a brochure, Green Mountain at Fox Run is now a women's weight loss spa staffed by friendly, knowledgeable, and professional people.

The blog is the key to personalization.

Drop by A Weight Lifted today, and let the writers know your thoughts on their blog.

Tags: SEO clients, business blogs, RSS, SEO blog.

READ MORE - An SEO client adds blog component

This week sees an economics approach to the travelling business show, recognized by one and all as Carnival of the Capitalists makes a visit at Michael Cage's business blog called Local Small Business Marketing.

This week's edition of Carnival of the Capitalists highlights some of the best bloggers writing on the internet today.

Blogging topics presented include entrepreneurship, management, market trading, internet commerce, marketing, the national and global economies, and technology.

As you would expect from Local Small Business Marketing, there are many discussions of business, markets, and economics.

It's always great to read and discover the many high quality blogs out there in the blogosphere.

We don't always get to them all, and this edition of Carnival of the Capitalists has introduced many of us to some brand new ones.

As I am always privileged to do, I have an entry in this week's Carnival of the Capitalists as well.

My entry post this week is titled "Crawling webs with search engine spiders" where I discuss the importance of inviting and making welcome the search engine spiders. They are very important visitors to your blog or website. Give them lots of yummy spider food in the form of content, and provide them ease of navigation around your web pages.

If you wish to submit an entry to next week's, or any Carnival of the Capitalists edition, e-mail your entries to the new address:

cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com

You can always use the handy entry form at Gongol.com where all you have to do is fill in the blanks. Talk about making it easy to be included!

Another brand new form for sending entries to all of the internet carnvivals is provided by The Conservative Cat. This is a great one stop entry drop, for all your blog post entries, for every blog carnival.

If you are searching for new and exciting ways to expand your blog's readership, you should seriously consider sending an entry to Carnival of the Capitalists.

Merely being included in the company, of the first rate regular Carnival of the Capitalists contributors, will enhance the reputation of your blog.

The extra visitors can't sent to your blog won't hurt either!

The growth and staying power, of Carnival of the Capitalists, is beginning to catch the attention of people outside the blogging community. Each hosting, brings a fresh assortment of new readers, to the various blogs involved.

The visitors aren't only bloggers anymore.

Readership is expanding to include the mainstream media, various government and private organizations, many businesses, and other interested people from beyond the blogging community.

Many people are introduced to some tremendous blogs that they might otherwise have missed.

Next week's Carnival of the Capitalists will be at Joshua Sharf's business, politics, and investment blog known as View From A Height.

In the meantime, click that mouse over to the Local Small Business Marketing hosting of Carnival of the Capitalists.

If the great posted entries don't convince you to click, or the possibility of finding some brand new blogs to read doesn't do it, then Carnival of the Capitalists certainly will offer you some local small business marketing ideas. (groan)

Tags: carnivals, capitalism, business, marketing.

READ MORE - Carnival of the Capitalists at Local Small Business Marketing

Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line

Hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff of Build a Better Blog System.


Marketing Your Book the Easy Way

Wednesday, August 3, 2005, 8:30 p.m. ET

Guest Expert, Kim Dushinski, How To Market My Book

195,000 books were published last year. (That is 534 every day!) The fact is that your book faces some serious competition in the marketplace. The good news is that you have tons of choices in how to market your book.

Choosing the right path for promoting your book will not only help you sell more books it will make your whole marketing experience that much easier. In this conversation we go over book marketing strategies and techniques and how to know if they will work for your book.

Registration for this free teleseminar with Kim Dushinski:

http://www.ConversationsWithExperts.com

Conversations with Experts is sponsored by Build a Better Blog System.

Tags: teleseminars, Kim Dushinski, book marketing, authors.

READ MORE - Free teleseminar: Conversations with experts - Kim Dushinski

Links come naturally to blogs.

The constantly updated fresh content, that is a hallmark of blogs, is a magnet for natural links. In particular, other bloggers will freely link to content that interests them or their readership.

It’s not unusual to get multiple links from a blog, to more than one page of your own blog. The process is widespread among blog owners, but is rarely considered by those outside the blogging community.

A blog writer adds a fresh daily entry, commonly referred to as a post, to the blog. That post will appear on the blog’s home page. A few bloggers who read the writer’s posts, on a regular basis, will link to the unique URL of the post. That URL is called a permalink. That provides the blog with one incoming link; but wait there’s more.

The linking blog will often add a link a to the blog’s home page as well, as a form of blogging etiquette. When the fresh post scrolls off the blog’s home page, the linked post will be linked from the sending blog, as will the home page.

In effect, a post can but not always, provide a blog with two incoming links. While the sending blog post will scroll off of its blog home page too, it is sending links to two receiving pages.

The links to posts are not the only value either. If that were the case, the blog linking power would be less than what happens in the real world. The linking blog is highly likely to be themed for the same topics as the receiving blog. That common theme relationship alone provides the much sought after relevant incoming links. All of the major search engines place high value, and give high search rankings to pages that are theme relevant.

As if that weren’t enough, there is still more benefit as well. The linking blogger very often provides strong keyword rich link anchor text within the blog post too. That is a powerful and often unexpected bonus, for the receiving blog.

The clickable link, laden with some of the receiving blog’s most important keywords as anchor text, and surrounded by theme relevant content, has sent many a blog page to the top of the search rankings. As obviously natural linking and unmanipulated anchor text, the search engine algorithm gives links from within blog posts heavy weighting.

Along with receiving links from other blogs, incoming links frequently arrive at the blog’s doorstep from traditional static websites. Those website links are usually very strongly theme relevant links, as it’s rare for a website owner to link to a blog that has little theme and topic relevance.

In effect, almost all incoming links from traditional websites linking to blog content, will be theme related. As such, the receiving blog gets strong link popularity value and maximum Google PageRank transfer from the sending web page.

There is even some evidence that linking out to other theme relevant blogs and websites helps to boost your blog in the search engine rankings. Don't fall for the often spoken concern of "leaking" value from your blog. Indeed, the opposite is true. A net benefit is gained from linking out to other blogs and websites.

This linking out concept was strongly implied in the Google patent application, and is part of the development of a highly ranking hub site. A hub site features numerous incoming and outgoing links, based on a particular theme, making that blog or website a very key source of information.

As you can see, it's time to think about links.

Add some links to your blog today.

Tags: links, SEO, theme relevance, hub sites.

READ MORE - Link think: Basic blog SEO