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Now before this post results in thirty comments saying how inaccurate Alexa’s site popularity measurement is, I completely agree. The matter of the fact is that some advertising agencies still use Alexa to price how much you will earn for advertising on your blog. If you can improve your Alexa rank, it will mean that you will can more money. I will include a few free techniques as well as some cheap paid ones.

Synopsis:
If you are looking for really basic methods and a introduction to Alexa, check out DoshDosh’s guide. I am going to skip all of the basic stuff and provide a few easy methods to maximize your Alexa rank quickly.

Let me start off saying that if you do not use Google Webmaster Tools, you should start trying it out. It is a great tool that shows you near-instant updates of backlinks to your posts, how often Google views your blog, as well as any errors that the Google bot finds.

Utilizing the tools will help you keep your blog search engine friendly and clean. Now for the point of this article, Google normally has a “normal” and a “slower” option for how often it will crawl your page. If you write at least a few times a week you should keep this at “normal,” but if you have a slow webhost or another reason that you do not want Google visiting a lot you can set it to slow.

After sponsoring two contests earlier which yielded successful results, I am ready to run my own. Rather than running the occasional type of blog contest, I wanted to change things up a bit. I want to have a lot of winners rather than just one. I have developed a way to promote my blog while giving away money every week.

I have been busy updating my version of Wordpress to the newest release (2.3.2), and doing a lot of finishing touches on my new blog theme. Everything is finally ready and published. The new theme allows for much easier reading (white background, black text), gets rid of the dominant orange color scheme, provides additional advertising methods, and features the best information prominently. The new theme also features the updated logo/brand for my blog.When I started my blog last November, I told myself not to start monetizing for at least 30 days. Well today, 73 days later I have officially opened up some bargain advertising deals on my blog.

BlogOnExpo has arrived!

Many bloggers tend to skip blogging expos and conferences because they cost too much, are too far away, or would take too much time to visit. BlogOnExpo is aiming to fill this void by providing a way to see these conferences and to be able to watch them for free at your computer.  BlogOnExpo showcases interviews and videos from many well known individuals and releases a few more every 24 hours (until the 18th), in which they will leave the links online until their next event in May. BlogOnExpo also has podcasts for you to download.

This Guest Post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services. To get your own guest post on Mixed Market Arts, please visit the Guest Post page.

There are millions of blogs out there, so how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are proven methods you can use to raise your blog’s profile, but it will take months of good solid work - and it starts before you have even written the first post.

Optimization

The news is nearly a month old, but Forbes is still only sending out private email invitations about their new project. I had originally heard about it when there were few details about it, but I have found a few new updates and thought I would share my findings and opinions. Lets get started with some details…

Who?
Forbes, the business & financial news powerhouse

What?
Forbes is launching a business and financial blog network

When?
Forbes plans to launch it sometime this month

My Akismet has just blocked the 1000th spam comment on my blog. Akismet is easily the most important plugin you can have on your blog. Without Akismet, I would have spent hours reading and deleting those emails, and moderating all of the comments.  I have received 748 actual comments and over 1000 spammy comments.  This means I would have had to spend more than twice as much time approving and deleting all of the comments without the plugin. If you are not yet using Akismet, grab it now.

From Their Site: