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Search Giant Yahoo has just relaunched the Beta of Yahoo! Buzz as a revamped Social Content experience, despite the ongoing saga between itself and Microsoft.

The site which is seen as just another Digg Clone by many people, does have an added twist though. The most popular stories will get to be featured on the Yahoo home page (the most popular homepage in the world).

Yahoo uses a ranking system called a Buzz Score which takes into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search, and the number of times that content is shared with friends by email. This then generates a “Buzz Score” (just above the Buzz Up button on the content).

At the Top of the Buzz homepage there is a section called Just Added. This module contains the latest content that has recently been submitted to Yahoo! Buzz from publishers.

At the moment the site is in ‘Beta’ which means that while all the features are being tested, Yahoo will not accept any new publishers to submit stories to the site, other than the pre-approved news publishers that were invited to take part by Yahoo.

To help prevent anyone abusing the voting system you must be logged in to be able to vote on any of the stories submitted. To log in you just need your ‘Yahoo! ID.

Please leave a comment regarding this post. I would love to hear about all your experiences of using Yahoo! Buzz.

Technorati Tags: digg, social content, yahoo, yahoo buzz

When you first start writing to a New blog what you are looking for in addition to traffic to your posts, is to try to create a community of like minded and loyal readers that you can interact with.

One way you could go about this is by encouraging your readers to leave useful comments on the articles that you write. I have just found a great little wordpress plugin that could help with that.

The plugin is called CommentLuv and can be found here at FiddyP’s site.

What is so useful about this plugin you may ask.

When a reader leaves a comment on your blog they get a link back to the Site that they entered in the Website or URI field in your blog posts comment box. This is all well and good for your reader, especially if you use the Dofollow plugin on your blog, as this May help them to receive some extra page rank for their site. It could be better though, by making use of the CommentLuv plugin there is a new tickbox added to the comments section that says:

Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you.

What happens is that the CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin visits the feed of the comment author and then it attempts to scrape the last post they made and display it as an Extra Link under their comment.

This is much better for your reader as now they have an Extra Link pointing back to their site, and better for your blog as more poeple leave comments for you.

There is some more in depth information on the use of the plugin over at the plugins Homepage.

Go ahead and try it out below by leaving a comment to this article.

Talk to you soon.

Technorati Tags: dofollow, plugin, Wordpress

Do you wish sometimes that you could read the minds of your readers?

What I mean is, if your readers were to perform a search on your blog for the example term ’social marketing’, you would not know about it would you! Therefore if that searched for term does not appear in any of your blog posts your reader could go elsewhere for their information.

It would be far better if you could provide the information that your readers were searching for.

Enter Psychic Search a Free Wordpress Plugin from Pawan Agrawal of MaxBlogPress. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Technorati Tags: Free Wordpress Plugin, MaxBlogPress, Psychic Search

Welcome to the first article in my series on - How to start getting more Traffic to your Blog.

When you first start out on your Blogging journey, getting more traffic to your new blog is a very high priority. There are various ways you can go out this, such as:

• Use Paid Advertising.
• Comment on other blogs in the same niche as yours.
• Write Posts That other People Will Want To Read
• Submit Your Blog To Directories or Traffic Exchanges.
• Use the power of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking.

Over the next few posts I am going to concentrate on using Social Bookmarking and Social Networking to help establish your blog.

Why use these techniques I hear you say!

Well if you look at the Traffic rankings section of sites such as Alexa you will see that some of the most visited sites in the world today are either Social Networking or Social Bookmarking sites. In fact sites such as You Tube, My Space and Facebook generate as much, if not more traffic than the Top search engines.

I was lucky enough recently to be invited to join the latest brainchild of Jack Humphrey of ‘The Friday Traffic Report‘. His new Social Marketing Central Network helps people build their social authority on sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Squidoo and HubPages. This in turn helps to drive traffic and then hopefully loyal readers back to your blog.

Jack provides some of the best tips on how to use these sites effectively.

Stay tuned for the next part in this series

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social networking

Technorati Profile

StumbleUpon Profile

Social Marketing Central

Squidoo

HubPages

del.icio.us

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social networking

There are so many WordPress Plugins available, What do you think are the best out there?

Here is a round up of my some of my Favorite WordPress Plugins (in no particular order) that I use.

1. Akismet:

Akismet is a free for personal use plugin that does a great job in helping to protect your blog from spam. You will first need to get an API key (available when you register for a Free WordPress.com user account) in order to activate and use Akismet. You can find out more info about Akismet here.

2. Do-Follow:

A great plugin (I use it on this blog) that helps to give your readers an extra incentive to leave comments on your blog. This is done rewarding them with “dofollow” backlinks back to their blogs. This could help boost their ranks in search engines. You can find out more about the Do-Follow plugin (that I use on this blog) over at Semiologic.

3. Enforce www. Preference:

Do you decide if you want to make your website accessible through http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com? It may cause problems if you use both, as it could split your backlink count and maybe even your page rank. The easiest way to solve this is with the help of the Enforce www. Preference plugin. A bonus with this plugin is that it will strip off index.php from the end of your URIs.

4. Subscribe To Comments:

This plugin helps to keep the conversation in your comments alive. It allows anyone that comments on your blog to check a tickbox before leaving their comment, they can then receive e-mail updates of further comments to the post that they have subscribed to. Find out more about this plugin here.

This is only a small sample of the plugins that are available for WordPress. You will all have your favorites that you use on your own blogs. Please feel free to leave a comment below, as I would love to hear all about them.

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

Technorati Tags: favorite wordpress plugins, plugins, Wordpress

Jack Humphrey who is the author of The Authority Black Book has just launched a brand new social community called Social Marketing Central.

It is a great place where people with more experience in social marketing in all forms, mix with and help out newbies that have just started out, with the purpose of helping each other drive traffic to to their sites.

Jack chose the Ning Platform to host the community as it contained all the tools needed to run the site without him having to install scripts or mess with any membership coding.

You can click on the link below to find out more about this new community as it unfolds. There are now over 275 members (as of the time of the post), with many more joining every day.

Once you join the Social Marketing Central community you have the chance to also join one of the smaller niche groups, such as:

• The Squidoo Succes Group
• The WordPress Central Group
• The Stumble Request Group
• The Joint Venture Group

The purpose of these and other groups like them on Social Marketing Central, is for fellow community members to network together to help each other in the various group activities. The community as a whole can also help with driving large amounts of traffic to your blogs or websites.

Check out the Social Marketing Central community. I’ll see you over there.

Visit Social Marketing Central

Technorati Tags: , Jack Humphrey, Ning, Social Marketing Central, social network

First of all I would like to welcome you all to aBlogPost.com. I have started off this blog in response to a contest that is currently being run by Eric Giguere over at MEMWG The Unofficial AdSense Blog.

I think that sometimes I have a problem with motivating myself to Post to a blog on a regular basis, this competition is a great way to kick things off with a new blog as the rules are very simple.

• First off you need to create the equivalent of a page of content for each day in February (29 pages this year as we have a leap year). This could be a blog post or any other web page, an article or even a comment on a blog.

• Each of the pages must contain at least 200 words, so that it makes each post worth reading.

• Each of the 29 pages need to be linked to the corresponding day entry over at Eric’s blog by means of a comment with a link back to your page of content.

After the contest ends Eric will verify that all 29 pages have been created and linked to the posts on his blog.

Everyone that has participated in the contest will receive a free copy of Uncommon AdSense. One lucky person will also win a copy of PLRSiteBuilder.

I registered for the contest on the last day of entry (February 8), so I have a little bit of catching up to do. Please check back over the next few days to see how things are progressing, or you could follow along by subscribing to my RSS feed.

See you all for my next post.

Technorati Tags: adsense, blog, contest, Eric Giguere