The best blog design in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.

So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.

You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.

All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric’s posts. Your dates don’t have to match up exactly.]

By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)

Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?

You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.

If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As you know, getting links back to your blog from highly ranked web sites is a great way to both promote your blog to new potential readers and raise your blog’s ranking in Google and other search engines (so more people can find it.)

A good source of information on blog promotion and making money on line is a guy named Matt Garrett. I’ve got his ebook Lazy Git Marketing, and I like it.

So I joined his email list. You should, too. There is no cost to subscribe, and he offers some gems of advice.

Although Matt prefers to use html sites, everything he says about promoting web sites and making money with them applies equally to blogs. And he’s a pretty clever guy.

Today, just one valuable piece of information (out of several) from a recent blog post of Matt’s made the whole subscription worthwhile. He has developed a no-cost Facebook application (if you haven’t yet joined Facebook, do) that lets you add links to all your blogs and websites.

If you do not belong to Facebook, you are missing out on an opportunity to promote yourself and your blogs. Nowadays more and more employers and clients expect to be able to find you on Facebook. It is your face to the world.

Matt’s new Facebook application lets you link back to your own and others’ blogs and web sites. It also does several other things. Here’s a quote from Matt’s email newsletter:

Did you know it’s possible to get links to your sites from your
Facebook Profile page?

There’s a new facebook app called TagK that allows you to add links
to all your social site profiles, like MySpace and Flickr, to your
profile page, but the REAL neat feature of this app is if you
invite a few friends to use it as well then you get bespoke links
that you can use for linking to your own sites/blogs…

You might recognise one of the people behind this new app…

you can visit the blog for the app, which includes the link to add
the app, here:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=MPDTl&m=1f5hYlCNd9JiQr&b=U7kaeRwm7s_KT67hRxfBPQ

So, you might want to take a look. This one application has so many possibilities that it makes Facebook a great place for promoting your blog.

I just discovered this site where you can make a widget of your own blog posts. They call it a “blidget.”

This widget, or blidget, automatically picks up and displays your last few blog posts. It is your very own private BlogRush-type widget, featuring only your own blog!

Others can then get your blidget and put it on their blogs if they want to keep up with your posts (sort of like putting the Digg widget on your blog). Or you can put your blidget on other blogs and/or websites that you own.

Not only that, but when you create a blidget, you can then easily add it to your Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or other site by clicking a button. It’s all very automated and easy.

Here is an example that I made for this blog:

You can customize your widget, and others who get your widget to put on their blog can customize it to suit their site.

Register, and you can store your widgets and have them listed in a blog directory for others to see (and maybe post on their blogs).

Also, by registering your blog, you get a free link back to your site from what is sure to be a highly Google-ranked site as it catches on. (That’s great for getting traffic and helping raise your blog’s ranking).

This is really fun stuff! Go see for yourself at Widgetbox.com.

I’m currently trying out a service called Real Traffic Exchange. It puts text ads on your site with links to other sites. Your ad for your site, in turn, is shown on other sites in the Real Traffic system. These do not compete with Google Adsense, so you can have both on the same page without violating the Adsense terms of service.

To see how the ads will appear, scroll down and look below the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this page. Nice, eh? The ads can be customized to some extent, and I like them.

And there is no cost to join or use the service. You can buy extra ads if you want to. That could be a good way to launch a new blog.

I have not analyzed the results yet, and I’ll let you know when I do. Meanwhile, you may want to give Real Traffic a try for promoting your blogs and other websites.

Do you want 2000 links to your blog for free? Yeah, I thought so.

In case you are new to blogging and/or search engine optimization, let me explain. A big part of how Google determines the Page Rank (PR) of your site is by how many backlinks (one-way links to your site from other sites) you have. The higher PR the sites that link to you have have, the more they help raise the ranking of your site. (That is search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell.)

Brad Callen offers a program called Directory Submitter that you can download from his site at no charge. It allows you to select which directories to submit to (for example, only PR 4 or above). Then it automates directory submission, saving you hours and hours—or days and days—or time.

All you do is provide your email address and register the program. It’s that simple. You can download Directory Submitter here.

.

Go, now! Sorry I didn’t mention it before.

By the way, Brad’s other programs are excellent, too. Not all of them are free, but they are great.

I just reread the message that appears in the blog category area of the BlogRush dashboard. What they are saying seems to be that if they don’t think your post fits into the subcategory you selected, they move it to the General category.

That’s better than not displaying it in the widget at all, but it still leaves the problem of not having enough subcategories. And, of course, there is still the problem of some blogs either not fitting in any category or fitting a little bit in several but not well enough in any. How to choose?

And why won’t they allow us to just select a main category to begin with instead of making us choose from their few, often inappropriate subcategories?

Hopefully they will keep expanding and revising the blog category scheme till they get it right. Until then, what is your strategy if you have blogs that do not fit?

I eagerly awaited the promised new blog categories at BlogRush. Now I’m really disappointed! The new categories have really hurt some of my blogs. As bad a fit as some of the overly general categories used to be, some of my blogs no longer fit into the new BlogRush category scheme at all!

Why Should We Care About BlogRush Categories?

BlogRush now apparently filters your posts and decides whether or not to sydicate them. So if you categorize your blog as being about, say, Painting, and you make a post that is mainly about drawing (which of course is an important aspect of most paintings), your post may not be syndicated (listed in the BlogRush widget). As near as I can tell, it would now be considered to be off topic!

By getting too specific with categories (and get rid of general categories as an option), they are crippling the more general blogs and also the specialized blogs that do not fit into BlogRush’s new, very narrow specific categories. Following are examples from my own experience.

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