If you have not read my earlier post about the benefits of guest posting, then you can read this article here.

Getting an opportunity to guest post at a good blog is not as easy as it sounds. Why would the blogger accept you, especially if you are new to blogging and is not an authority in your niche?

Guest posting has two faces to it – At some point during your career as a blogger, you would also want people to write for your blog even as you would want to write guest posts for other established blogs. If your blog has good traffic, people will come to you the same way you are approaching other bloggers today. Hence, this will not be a difficult task to do. But if you are to build up traffic to your blog right now, you will still want some bloggers to guest post on your blog and write some valuable content. At this point it would be a difficult thing to do as there would not be too many takers to do it. It is a vicious circle and guest posting could turn out to be a nightmare.

If you have ever tried this, you could vet this and you would agree to this.

My Blog Guest is a unique service started by Ann Smarty that is oriented towards resolving these problems in guest posting. This is a unique forum where you will find a lot of people interested in guest posting and a few others who are inviting guest posts for their blogs. There is no other such forum available as of now.

The forum seems to be new, but there are quite a few members and the interactions seem to be very encouraging. You can check out the forum here.

A detailed post on guest posting could be a part of another post.

Photograph courtesy Scottie

Did you hear about Google Buzz?

If not, then it is time to read about it. Just type “Google Buzz” at Google search and you will get a list of websites related to an about Google Buzz.

It is not a new phenomenon. But as always and whatever Google has been known for, they have changed the buzz word in the market. It was Twitter until sometime back, but it is Google Buzz now or, so it seems.

What is Google Buzz?

That statement above would have given you a jist of what, this new thing on the internet could be. This is a new service that Google has launched. It is similar to the micro-blogging service that Twitter has but with a huge and welcome difference. Buzz does not have a character or, word limit to its service. So if you had always felt that you were tied down by the limit that Twitter put up there, then Google Buzz is for you.

If you are still looking for a definition for Buzz, then this is what Google has to say -

Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting.

You can see from the above definition that this new service gives you an option of sharing anything including photos and videos.

This service was launched about a couple of days back and it already has a good number of users according to Google and it is growing. Looking at the way Twitter has grown over the past year or, so, it is sure that Google Buzz too, will grow in popularity.

Google Buzz is available as an add-on on your Gmail account. So if you do not have a Gmail account, you can create one and enjoy this service straight out of your email. What’s more, it even gives you an option of using it straight from your iPhone.

Features in Buzz -

Though Google is writing about introducing a lot of features in the day to come, the initial features with Buzz itself is worth noting. I am absolutely amazed with the service. These are the features -

• Automatic friends lists – All friends who you have emailed in Gmail are added automatically. There is quite a bit of uproar about the privacy violations because of this feature, but I did not find it to be a problem, because you have an option of turning it off.
• “Rich fast sharing” combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing.
• Public and private sharing – You can swap between family and friends and decide if you want to keep a Buzz private or, public.
• Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content.
• “Recommended Buzz” puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you’re not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.

Almost all of these features are welcome feature. Though it will take some time for us to get used to all of this and learn everything about Google Buzz, the present feeling is one of excitement.

You can check out the  below video to know more about Google Buzz. Join me at Buzz by following me.

• Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)
• “Rich fast sharing” combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing.
• Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends).
• Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content, like the photo viewer we mentioned above).
• “Recommended Buzz” puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you’re not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback.

Do you find yourselves in a situation where you do not get enough time to blog? Does it happen that you create a schedule for your entire day, and find that have most of the things that you planned went untouched, the entire day.

This is a normal phenomenon and every internet marketer and Blogger comes across this situation a lot of times. How would you arrest this situation?

Time is of utmost importance in blogging and Internet Marketing. The 80-20 principle, about which a lot of bloggers have written and talked about, is something that has proven to hold true in Internet Marketing.

What is the 80-20 rule?

The 80-20 rule is also called as the “Pareto Principle”, “law of vital few” and the “principle of factor sparsity”. It is defined as follows -

Pareto principle is a theory that states that 80% of the effects are the result of 20% of the source(s) or participants, of any given event. A few items contribute the most; these are the vital few, as opposed to the trivial majority.

This means that 80% of the result is influenced by 20% of what you do. This holds good in anything that you do and and that is where this rule carries value.

In blogging too, it is true that 20% of the things that you do is what determines 80% of the results. Put it in a different perspective, it means that only a few things amongst everything that you do in your blogging and Internet marketing business is important. But what are these few things?

It is not a difficult task to do, but at the same time it is also not that easy to identify the real activities that influence the majority of your results. In order to do that it is extremely important that you identify your prime activities. In other words, it is important for you to prioritize everything that you do in a day.

As an affiliate marketer, I always faced this problem of “too much to do with too little time”. Even after planning the entire day, I found that I could only do 10% of what I had planned. I often wondered as to what could be the reason for this.

Look at this statistics about what newbie internet marketers felt they did in an average day -

When I saw these statistics, I felt as if it was a survey done on me. This is was indeed, my story. I realized that I was spending time on un-important things and lost focus of the more important things that I should have been doing.

How to be more productive?

In order to be more productive, you will have to start concentrating on activities that are more important for your internet marketing business. The following tips can help you in identifying the activities that are un-important and thus eliminate them. This will in turn, help you focus on things that are important.

Unsubscribe from those newsletters – It is a tendency with all ‘not-so-famous internet marketers’ to subscribe to the newsletters and other such mailing lists from those so-called marketing Gurus. We do it with an intention of getting something that they offer for free, and to be aware about what they are promoting and how they are promoting. Good intention and valuable indeed!!

But,…. either unsubscribe from those newsletters or, create a separate mailbox or, mail ID, that you will only visit once in a week and provide that email address to all such subscriptions. Don’t waste your time browsing through their offers and signing up for more offers.

Stop Browsing – You need to stop browsing the internet immediately. You might have seen from the above statistics that this is the most un-productive activity of all. We have a tendency of checking out every other website that we see and browsing the internet and Google to find more such websites. But what is it that this activity yields? Nothing..

I would recommend that you install Firefox and close all unnecessary windows and keep open only the ones that are important to you, like your blog administration page, before you exit or, close your browser. So the next time you open your browser, there will be just that one window that will open and you will be reminded on what you should focus more on.

Limit reading emails – Do not share your email address with anyone except the ones that you think is really important and vital for your business. This way you will be able to reduce the number of emails that you get and thus will be able to reduce the time that you spend reading emails.

Get rid of your Statisticophobia – After about 2 months that I started my Internet Marketing business, I was making about $2-$3 per day from Adsense and I used to get about 25-30 visitors to my blog. I would check the statistics at my blog and at Adsense as soon as I login to my computer and then would keep checking it as if the statistics would have gone out of the roof. It was as if I had something to do with that visitor coming to my blog and as if I was waiting, so that I can catch him.

Check your statistics once in 2 days. That is enough. The statistics will improve when you do the right things and at the right time. But if you keep checking your statistics only, then there is nothing that is going to improve and the numbers will remain the same.

Enough of Blog Tweaking – It is not uncommon for us to keep designing and re-designing our blog or, website till we get that perfect design. But the fact remains that, the perfect design just doesn’t come. You are browsing through a few blogs and you find about some tweak that some guy is talking about and set out to implement that on your blog. Was it required? Was that important?

Blog designs are something that you can change once you are done with all your priority-1 tasks. even if you don’t tweak it today it will not stop functioning. Similar is the case with wordpress plugins. That jazzy plugin that you saw at the other blog is not going to get you new visitors or, money.

Stop focussing on the designing and tweaking of your blog. Leave it to the professionals if at all you think that it is that important. Find a blog management service that can help you do it for you, while you focus on other important things.

Order only what is required – The internet is full of courses and ebooks that promise you a millionaire lifestyle in a few days. Let’s face the truth. There is nothing that can make you rich quick unless you are a character from “Ocean’s Eleven”. Don’t fall for all that stuff out there on the internet, even if it is free.

Find a mentor – We as newbie internet marketers keep doing things the wrong way multiple times until we find the right way of doing it. This, in a way is wastage of precious time and money. But the question here is, why should you be re-inventing the wheel? Get a mentor who has seen through the difficulties and who know how to do it right. That ways you will not waste time on un-necessary activities and in turn and utilize that time in other productive activities.

These are just a few things that you could do to be more productive in your Internet marketing business. There could be many other such things that you might have to share. Share them by commenting here in this post.

This is the 2nd post in the series on Email Marketing and List building tips. For those of you who did not read the first post, you can read it here.

One of the most important aspects of deciding on an auto responder is the availability of a broadcasting facility.

For people who do not know what a broadcasting facility is, I will first explain it in a bit detail.

Auto responders provide you with the option of lining up pre-set messages to be sent to your subscribers. These messages could be sales letters, news feeds or, even informative articles that you want to send to your subscribers. This means that every subscriber in your list will get the messages in the order that you have set it in.

For e.g:- If you have set up a sequence of messages in such a way that message-1 goes after 2 days of the subscriber signing up, followed by message-2 on day-4 of signing up and so on, these messages will be sent in the sequence that you set-it up in on the date that you had scheduled it to be sent.

Now, let’s assume a scenario. You have been looking out for joint ventures with partners who are launching newer products and have finally managed to partner with an Internet Marketer who is just about to launch a new product. He has given you a set of 4 email newsletters that you have to start sending from today on, so that you get your subscribers to visit the pre-launch sales pages and sign up and ready themselves up for the product launch. You want to start promoting the product today itself so that you are amongst the first few who can cash in on the sales of the product.

But…. There is a problem.

You have queued up all the messages in you auto-responder and cannot interfere with the sequence. Wondering why?

1. Most importantly, you will have to mess with the entire  sequence of messages so that you can get these emails to go in between the already scheduled messages.
2. The product launch emails are ones that prepare a subscriber for a launch. Once the product is launched, you don’t want these emails to be still sent out to the newer subscribers who join your list.

This is where “Broadcasting” can help you.

What is Broadcasting?

In a crude definition, broadcasting would mean -

Broadcasting is an instant communication or, transmission that is sent out at a specified time, usually only once, and targeting a wider audience.

The term makes itself pretty much clear from the meaning. This is the same when applied to an auto responder as well. Auto responder services offer you the option of “broadcasting”, so that you can send out adhoc or, unplanned messages to your subscribers.

In the example that we discussed above, if the auto-responder service gives you an option of “broadcasting”, you could easily send out these messages to your subscribers.

If you are thinking that you will have to login and send the messages every specified day, then let me correct you. You don’t have to. Auto-responder services give you an option of scheduling you broadcasts as well. That way you can set it up and forget it. Your subscribers will get the emails on the scheduled time.

When you choose your auto-responder service, check these things about broadcasting -

1. If they offer you a broadcasting service?
2. If they have an option of scheduling broadcasts?
3. If they give you an option of copying existing broadcasts?
4. That there are no limits to broadcasts.

Aweber, is a market leader in auto-responder services. They offer all the above features as well and that too at an affordable price. You can check out Aweber here.