There has been a constant debate on the ideal length of a post in a blog. There are people who say that an idea can only be communicated in a blog post that is long. Small posts cannot express things effectively and so on.

What is your take on the ideal length of a post?

To a great extent it is true that what you want to express looses its effectiveness if you do not explain it in detail and in a manner that your reader understands it. In order for you to put your point across effectively, you have to write a detailed post and such posts will be about 600-700 words long. I am a firm believer of the fact that blogging is like story telling and for a story to be effective you have create a background for the story and when you create a background, the story becomes slightly longer that you would want it to be.

Just imagine, would the Hollywood movie “Avatar” be as effective, if the director tried to wrap it up in less that 90 minutes. It would not, right? Nobody bothered about the length of the movie, because the story was neatly laid out and told effectively.

So, does that mean only long stories can be effective? No, that is not the case.

Then how can will you make a long story short and yet keep it effective?

Let us discuss about the movie “Avatar” itself. If you have seen the movie, you will notice the fact that the beginning of the movie is actually a narration. The director narrates a background very effectively in very limited words and straight jumps into the actual story. The base of the story is the narration at the beginning, yet it is so effectively communicated in a short narration and while doing this the director also ensures that the viewers do not loose interest or, focus in the story.

While writing blogs posts, it is important to do the following -

1. Identify what is the crux of your article and write about that it only so much detail that your readers can clearly understand it.
2. Rewrite all such sentences that are creating the background for the article in such a way that it conveys a longer message in shorter sentences.
3. Whenever you write short sentences to convey an idea, just ensure that you maintain a smooth flow of ideas into the next few sentences where you actually narrate the story.

Having said all that, I should also say something here. While we are discussing about the length of the blog post in this post, and while the world may profess that the length of the post is important, Brian Clark, who is a master copywriter himself, breaks all the myths by writing one of the shortest but most effective posts, I have ever seen. You can see this post “Actually, Blogging *is* dead” at his blog at copyblogger.com.

In an effective and short post he discusses about the debate on “blogging is dead”. He very smartly links this post to a few of his earlier posts thus ensuring that he creates some internal links and also makes his readers ask for more. And they find more information when they read the other posts that he is linking to in this particular post. I rate this as the “Post of the year”. This short post has already been tweeted 538 times, has been shared 58 times on Facebook and has about 85 comments. That can tell you the effectiveness of the post.

So, forget about the length of the post. An effective post can be short too.

This is a guest post by Philip Rudy. You can read the guidelines for guest posting at our write for us page.

The Internet marketing world can get very busy and very messy really fast and if you aren’t working with the proper equipment then it will be impossible for you to ever meet the potential that you want to be at. When you are first starting out in the SEO industry everything is usually ran on a small scale and all of the work usually circulates through a panel of about 4-10 people. This is great in the beginning because everyone who is involved usually knows how to get from point A to point Z in whatever the process may be, or they are at least are experts in their own little area. If you want to scale things up in the SEO world however, you will need the help of some Internet tools.

Internal Collaborating System

This is one of the first types of tools you will need to take full advantage of. An internal collaborating system allows you to eliminate all the time you spend figuring things out with other employees through phone, email, or face to face contact. This allows you to create and assign tasks, watch the progress of a project through milestones, record things in databases, create project and work-spaces, and much much more. So much time can be wasted collaborating with your work force if you do not have a system set up that can automate everything. This problem multiplies if a lot of your work force works from home. An internal collaborating system gets everything that needs to be done and the details associated with it in one place, so that every body can be on the same page at the same time from their computer desk.

File and Folder Sharing

Although an internal collaborating system can be used for this, it is probably better to get everything you need in terms of files in folders in a separate system. Something like “DropBox” is perfect. It is like a folder that everyone who is invited can share. You can put anything in there – from text documents all the way to videos and everything is instant. You can organize everything the way you want it, and something like this is great for when hundreds and hundreds of files, excel sheets, and videos start to pile up in places that you don’t want it to be. A file and folder sharing system is just another way that the collaboration part of working gets automated.

Public Relations or Link Management Software

This is very important for web site owners especially. That is because Google looks at the number of back-links you have as one of the main reasons for determining a web sites rank in their search engine. When you are building a number of links for your web site, things can get very messy and you will end up spending more time organizing everything and keeping track of everything than you will actually building the links. Link management software allows you to record web sites and all the details that come along with the relationship with that web site. This simple fact that it allows you to automate the organization of your link building campaign is the reason that you will be able to scale it up to the level it needs to be at without wasting too much time. There are a lot of SEO advantages in having link management software – and not just link building. The simple fact that it helps keep track of your online relationships is a major plus because online relationships are what will help your business to grow.

So as you can see, there are tons of reason to get Internet tools and make them work for your business. There are all sorts of different kinds of tools out there that can probably help your business in the long run. The whole goal of advancing in the online world is the ability to be able to scale things to a larger level because what works on the small scale does not always necessarily work on the large scale. Internet tools like these will help you do that.

If you have been into Internet marketing or, have been trying to do something in Internet Marketing, you will surely have come across the thousands of product launches that happen everyday. It is highly unlikely that you will not have.

What is the one thing that you have noticed commonly in all of these launches?

No prizes for the right guess!!

The one of the many things that are common is the fact that most of the products discoveries happened by accident. Just go back and check on the recent launches and you will find that these products were discovered by broke internet marketers accidentally while they were struggling with all the tools that were available on the internet to make money.

Are you convinced with the theory?

Most of us are, and that is where we buy the product. But I am not too convinced. If the theory was true why wouldn’t I want to wait for a few more months and then I will also discover something if I keep on trying and be rich some day. Isn’t it?

It doesn’t work that way. Not everything happens accidentally. Columbus could have discovered America accidentally and so was the discovery of penicillin. But info-products and softwares are not discovered by accident.

Having said that, I should also says that the fact of the matter is that product launches that follow this discovery theory are  always successful. They are seen to get massive conversions. You can pick a few random products from Clickbank in the IM niche and check this out for yourself.

Why is the accidental discovery theory a successful Product Launch Formula?

Human psychology is such that we always tend to relate to stories that are similar to us. Organizations have been using this to their benefits since long. Advertisements showing a housewife appeals to housewives whereas advertisements showing working women appeal to working women. All of these strategies are based on this aspect of human psychology.

Similar is the case of relating to stories that speak about people who were ordinary, did ordinary things and suddenly became famous and rich.

Internet Marketing is not difficult. Success in Internet Marketing is determined by the length of your persistence. 95% of people jumping into Internet Marketing fail. It is here that this product launch formula strikes. When you read about an ordinary guy struggling with his business, doing all the ordinary things that you too have been doing, you start to relate to him. Further when you read that this same ordinary guy discovered something accidentally, which soon catapulted him to fame and helped him earn lots of money, you start to feel a certain truth in the entire story. You feel that there is something in the technique that he has discovered which is the difference between him and you, the difference between success and failure.

At this juncture you are pretty much convinced about the product. You stop evaluating about all the other aspects of the product. Your brain stops evaluation. The stage of the brain is the “Buyers’ Coma”. The decision is taken and you buy the product.

This theory of accidental discovery is one of the most popular product launch formula. The sheer success of the formula makes it the most preferred one also.

Is this method wrong? Is it unethical?

No it is not. Inducing a buyer to buy requires stimulating him to think about why he need the product. This formula does precisely that. So there is nothing unethical or, wrong about the method.

The next time you see a product launch using this product launch formula, don’t forget to evaluate the other aspects of the product as well.

Plugins are the difference between a WordPress blog and a blog hosted on any other platform. WordPress plugins have given us so many options that you can do pretty much anything today with one of the several plugins available – most of them free and a few of them paid. Setup an autoresponder on your blog,  auto approve comments, check spam, enhance your wordpress blog design, insert advertisements, add banner ads to you blog etc. is all a click of a few buttons if you have the right plugin installed.

I have several useful plugins installed that help me load my blog faster and also optimize it for the search engines. In addition to many free plugins that I use, there are a few paid plugins that I think every blog should have, if you are serious about building a better blog and making money out of it.

5 Essential Paid Plugins for your blog.

The 5 plugins that I am about to mention, are the most important and the minimum that any blog should have. If you think there are a few more, you can always write about them in the comments below for the benefit of our readers -

Pop-up Domination – This is one of the best plugins that I have ever used. Pop-up domination has helped me build my list. My list went up from a mere 10-15 signups a day to more than 50 signups a day after I installed Pop-up Domination.

Popup Domination is a list building plugin that helps you create attractive and handy pop-ups where you can offer your readers a useful product or, course in return for signing up to your lists. You need to offer value to your readers and popup domination will do the rest. With a simple installation and customization option, popup domination is the best list building tool you could ever get.

You can read my review of the Popup Domination plugin at Youtube.

Wp-Syndicator – This is another plugin that I am using on my blog. This plugin helps you syndicate you blog posts to more than 15 authority sites, thus helping you build backlinks to your posts. These sites include Posterous, Xanga, Identica, Tumblr, Friendfeed, Twitter, Brightkite, Multiply etc. Syndication is extremely easy with a few clicks and your articles get indexed in a few hours.

Wp-Syndicator is easy to install and easy to use and helps you build your blog’s presence on the internet. I was able to increase my backlinks by more than 73% after I started using this plugin. My readership increased by about 41% after using Wp-Syndicator.

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SEOPressor – If you are like me, I am sure you are tired of the SEO thing on your blog. SEO is a combination of a thousand things and I often try to ignore it because of the sheer efforts required in SEO. Here is a plugin that can take all the efforts out of SEO. I was surprised at the effect of the plugin, when I saw a few of my posts on the first page of Google, just by following the simple tips that SEOPressor told me.

SEOPressor would suggest on whatever is missing in your post and would also give your posts a score on SEO. Based on the suggestions, you can tweak your article and you will see the change in score. If the score is greater that 85%, then your article is most likely to get to the top of the search engines.

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MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate – The objective of any blog is to earn money. Monetization can be an extremely daunting task at times. Adding links, choosing affiliate programs, selecting the products etc. can be time-consuming and difficult. That is where MBP Ninja Affiliate Plugin comes in handy.

The Ninja Affiliate plugin can add links to your posts based on pre-chosen keywords. You can decide what all keywords you want to create links to. Once you have updated all your details on the options page of the plugin, you can relax. The plugin will add relevant product links to the keywords that you have chosen and will also add your affiliate code to it, thus monetizing your blog posts.

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Wp-Robot – This is another plugin I am a fan of. Though I do not use this plugin in this blog of mine (because this is not an auto blog), I have about 40 different auto blogs that I use this plugin on. Wp-Robot, generates content for my blogs on auto pilot and all I have to do is sit back and count the money flowing in from my auto blogs.

For those who are not aware of auto-blogs, these are blogs that run on auto-pilot and the articles on these blogs are normally posted by a robot application. You can monetize such blogs using adsense and other ad channels and also use affiliate links on them to make money.

Wp-Robot makes posting a simple activity. Just fill out all the options and forget it. Wp-Robot will keep publishing content to your blogs and you will not have to worry about it.

Order Wp-Robot now to set your Auto-Blog business on full throttle. Set it up and forget it and let the money flow. Click here to order Wp-Robot today!

These are the best 5 paid plugins that I have been using and have found benefits with. I have been able to make a considerable change in the way my business was run using these plugins. In case you know about any other plugin, let us know about it.