Celebrity Blogs

A list of Celebrity Blogs

After doing a bit of searching I was able to find a bunch of celebrity blogs. Some are updated more often than others but they're all interesting to read.

So here are some celebrity blogs in alphabetical order:

Scott Adams
Alec Baldwin
Bare Naked Ladies (BNL)
Dave Barry
David Byrne
Asia Carrera
Margaret Cho
Adam Curry
Jenna Elfman
Neil Gaiman
Tom Green
MC Hammer
Tommy Lasorda
David Mamet
Rosie O'Donell
Jamie Oliver
Keith Olbermann
Nancy Pelosi
Al Roker
Harry Shearer
Kevin Smith
Barbra Streisand
George Takai
Wil Wheaton


Do you know of a celebrity blogger that I don't have on the list? Please leave a comment with a link. Thanks!

10 Top Reasons to Create a Blog for Your Business

by Herman Drost

I postponed creating a blog for my business because I thought there was no marketing value in it and the ones Id seen were primarily news blogs or personal blogs. Well, that was some time ago for now many businesses are creating blogs to attract more visitors and make more sales.

What is a Blog?

This is a small or large online journal that allows the author to frequently write on topics of personal interest or of interest to his/her visitors. The writing style is usually informal. Visitors can instantly add their comments to the end of the authors writings or posts. The posts are in chronological order ie day, month and year. Topics may include commentary on the Internet, brief philosophical discussions, or social issues plus links to other sites the author favors.

The author of a blog is often referred to as a blogger.

Blogs are alternatively called web logs or weblogs. However, "blog" is less likely to cause confusion, because "web log" can also mean a servers log files.

10 top reasons to create a blog for your business

1. Ability to add content in minutes. You dont have to spend time uploading (FTP) files to your host like static sites. You can update your content from any computer that has internet access. If you have a brilliant idea you want to write about you just need to log in to your administration panel and enter your post.

2. Separate design from content. Blog software is database driven. This means you can alter the theme or template of your blog without affecting the content. Therefore you can immediately test different colors and designs to determine what best appeals to your visitors.

3. Search engine friendly. Blogging software such as Word Press allow you to generate search engine friendly pages. Instead of your pages ending in long URLS ie

http://www.mysite.com/main.php?category=books&subject=biography

they can end in .htm ie

http://www.mysite.com/pagebooks-biography.htm

Search engines like web sites that are updated frequently. Sites that dont receive new content quickly become stale. One of the main characteristics of a blog is that it is frequently updated so search engines will visit it often.

4. Create RSS Feeds. RSS (really simple syndication) feeds are integrated within blog software. So every time you post something to your blog it will create a RSS feed automatically. It will also notify some of the larger sites that carry these feeds and make them available for syndication. This is a great viral marketing method that will quickly attract many visitors.

5. Build link popularity. To increase your sites rankings in Google and other search engines, you need to generate many incoming links to your web site. The more links you have the better. If you create a blog that contains valuable content, you will have many people linking to you. RSS feeds are becoming a very popular and an easy way to read content quickly. Since your blog has this feature already built in, your link popularity will build faster than if you had a site with no feeds.

6. Encourages interactivity. Visitors can immediately add their own comments to your posts. This helps build a long term relationship with them and win their trust. It will also make your blog stickier because you will get many returning visitors eager to read others comments or write more of their own.

7. Make money. Blogs also offer a great way to place AdSense Ads on your pages. Word Press blogging software has a plugin that easily allows you to place AdSense Ads anywhere on your pages as well as all current pages on your blog. With a static site you would have to add the AdSense code to each page. You can also make money by promoting affiliate sites or selling your own product.

8. Customizable. Word Press blogging software has over 500 plugins and hundreds of different themes to choose from. This gives you the flexibility to make your blog the best it can be for your business purposes.

9. Easy administration. Here are some of the features of the Word Press administration panel:

-add content immediately

-change the theme (look and feel) of your blog without altering the content.

-create different permissions for people who will add content to your blog ie administrators, editors, contributors.

10. Help market your newsletter. Many emails dont get through to your subscribers these days because of spam blockers residing on your visitors computer or web hosts server. A blog that contains RSS feeds will enable visitors to receive your newsletter automatically by subscribing to the feed on your blog. You can also send your visitors an email that includes a link back to your blog. This will also help build links to your blog as people visit it.

Tip: Before you create a blog make sure you put some thought into the purpose of it and what topics you want to write about. Make a schedule to write often (ie daily, weekly or monthly) so it doesnt grow stale and lose interested visitors. If you have been putting off creating a blog, START NOW as you may be leaving money on the table.

Get Highly Effective Web Site Design, Marketing Tips and Tricks by visiting the authors Web Design Discussion Blog at http://www.drostdesigns.com

Herman Drost is a Professional Web Designer, SEO Specialist, Article Writer and Publisher of the "Marketing Tips Newsletter".

What are MFA sites?

Do you have AdSense ads on your blog? Have you heard about MFA sites? MFA stands for "Made for AdSense". These sites are generally created with only one purpose in mind; to make money from Google AdSense. At first that seems like a fair way to make some money but there's more to it than that. The problem with MFAs is that the sites are usually useless to vistors. They may have some illegaly scraped content from other sites but the main intent is to trick people into visiting the site so they can click on more AdSense ads.

By doing this they drive up ad costs for legitimate advertisers and hurt the image of AdSense ads which makes people less likely to click them. You would think Google would be more sensitive to this. After all, the guiding principal behind the updates to their Search Engine placement algorithims is that the more accurate and useful the search results are to visitors, the more likely people will stick with Google for their searching.

The reason MFA ads do well is that AdSense uses a system that factors high clickthrough rates (CTR) along with the cost of an ad. So, if an MFA has a more attarctive ad and it gets clicked more often, it will appear before higher cost ads for legitimate sites. Some MFAs will game the system by initially bidding high for their keywords when first running their ads to try to get good placement and then when their CTR is high they lower their bids and, because AdSense factors in CTR, their ads keep their high positions.

There is currently a lot of talk about AdSense publishers blocking MFAs from their sites. Anecdotal evidence suggests that banning MFAs can increase income. This may be due to the fact that MFA ads tend to be low paying but I also get the feeling that if a visitor to your site clicks on an AdSense ad and is sent to a useless site they may decide not to click on anymore of your ads the next time they visit your site.

Google obviously needs to figure out that AdSense and searches do not benefit from the same rules. CTR may be useful in detrmining value in the search arena but it can falsely promote shill sites in the PPC arena. Maybe once Yahoo and MSN get their PPC systems rolled out Google will pay more attention to the problems with AdSense and MFAs and clean up the system.

Blogging shirts

I found this blog entry today with a collection of t-shirts for bloggers. They're a fun way to let everyone know how obsessed you are about your blog.

Check them out here: T-shirts for Bloggers

Driving Traffic to Your Blog

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter* at http://www.sitemeter.com

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman

*Editors note: I personally use StatCounter for free traffic statistics.

Blogging: The New Exhibitionism

by Advice Diva
By now most of you have heard of the new internet superhighway craze called blogging. If you are not the most computer savvy person in the world, don’t worry, you don’t have to be. Everyone is blogging these days from the techno-chic to the cyber-geek, from the carpooling soccer mom to your own children in grade school.

For you first timers out there, a blog is a weblog. A weblog is an online diary or journal in which you may write your daily thoughts and ideas in. You can decide to keep a blog private, announce your name, let whoever you want read it or allow only particular people to view it. There are oodles of websites out there dedicated to servicing blogs and the majority of them are free. You just sign up and voila: you have your very own blog with your own web address where you can feel free to write whenever you want and as much as you want.

Blogs are used for a variety of reasons. Scores of small businesses are now finding blogging to be very useful as a free form of advertising for their own company. Many people use blogging as a convenient way of keeping a diary since they spend so much time on the computer at work. I have bumped into countless cubicle moaning blogs online. Aspiring writers are utilizing weblogs as a way to show off their work and gain free critiques. Perhaps the most interesting use of blogs, and which is by far the most popular, would be the personal blogs of sexual orientation and desire.

Since blogs are normally private in nature, people are rapidly finding out that blogging is a great way to share your dirtiest thoughts and secret fantasies with the rest of the world. This way, people are finding it much easier to find other like minded individuals in a very upfront way.

Most importantly, they have a new venue to express sexual thoughts openly, without being censured and without feeling vulnerable. These weblogs are usually very private with only an email address so that interested viewers can contact them. Some do not even include an email address but have an online chat box installed instead for even more privacy. Most all weblogs have the ability for any reader to post a response to a particular blog entry online. With all of this confidentiality, the once shy and lonely individual feels more willing to come out of the closet and be a shameless exhibitionist of sex and promiscuity. People now have a way to articulate themselves sexually even if they are the sheltered type.

Some webloggers create sites to explain their sexual curiosities. Some dictate their favorite wild and crazy fantasies. Others even go so far as to post nude and erotic pictures of themselves alone or with partners. Much of the time, you come across the usual gratuitous pornography.

Absolutely anything goes on your own online blog. There is no censorship and no mediator telling you what you can and cannot write. I came across a fabulous personal blog recently written by a very young and very beautiful woman. Her blog became a source of power for her. She is a dominating sort of woman who enjoys being a master to her male slaves. In her blog, she assumes the role of a Goddess and encourages very submissive males to beg for her affections and even send her gifts. And with the sexy revealing pictures she likes to post, her response is phenomenal. She might not have been able to express this sexual nature so powerfully without the help of the blog, especially at such a young age.

I can feel you asking now, “Is this a good thing”? The answer is: Absolutely! The more you are able to express yourself (in any sphere of interest), the better you can express yourself to others.

Many people fear expressing their sexual thoughts and ideas to others thereby preventing their own true happiness. The desires stay bottled up with nowhere to go. These blogs provide a way for the inhibited person to say what they really want to say. Once they can get it out somewhere, even if it is written online, they stand a better chance of relating these ideas to other people.

For questions and comments contact The Advice Diva at: thediva@advicediva.com
Please visit http://www.advicediva.com for more articles by the Diva

The Advice Diva has written three self-help guides on relationships and dating which can be found at http://www.advicediva.com She also hosts an online advice column which is completely free of charge. The Diva does not claim to be an expert in any field. However, she has the ability to understand relationhips through past experience and her incredible insight. Aside from her website, the Diva also publishes monthly articles in two magazines and several notable websites.