Archive for January, 2006

Looking For Books On Homeschooling

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

The publication below accepts book excerpts on the subject of home schooling:

Home Educator’s Family Times, P.O. Box 6442, Brunswick, ME 04011. Email: famtimes-at-blazenetme.net. Website: http://www.homeeducator.com/FamilyTimes. Jane R Boswell, Editor/Publisher. 80% freelance. “Homeschooling, Education, Family Issues.” Welcomes new writers. Circ. 25K print; 35K online. Bi-monthly in print; 24 electronic issues/year. Pays 1-2 months after acceptance. Period between acceptance and publication varies. Buys “one time rights and reprint permission in back issue archives.” Accepts reprints. Responds 1-2 weeks. Sample articles can be viewed online at http://www.homeeducator.com/FamilyTimes. Subscription $15.00 (only available in the U.S.). Guidelines online at http://www.homeeducator.com/FamilyTimes/submissions.htm.

CURRENT NEEDS: “Family stories, humor, educational issues, homeschooling experiences, book excerpts.” Pays $25 max for articles to 1200 words. Submit query or complete ms by email (text in email or MSWord attachment). “Include bio, web site, information about books published, etc.”

PHOTOS/ART: High resolution jpegs – 300 dpi minimum – or tifs. Pay varies.

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Blog Blast

Friday, January 20th, 2006

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I’m failing to heed my own advice.

Once of our authors at Booklocker.com sent an email asking about a piece of software called Blog Blast, which promises to place your ad on 2 million sites.

As a veteran of the online marketing world, when I hear about software like this I’m immediately skeptical. If it was really that easy, everyone would be doing it.

So when I investigated, I wasn’t too surprised to find out it is not legit.

Blog Blast is a tool for doing comment spam – basically placing fake comments containing your link on random blogs.

The “theory” behind comment spam is that these postings will appear to search engines as a link to your site from the blogs in question. Among other things, search engines look at how many sites are linking to your site. So this practice should raise your visibility in the search engines.

And for a while it did work, until the search engines got wise to it.

Today search engines look at the quality of the sites that are linking to your site. A bunch of links from low-quality, irrelevant sites actually hurts your search engine ranking. Plus, comment spam is so prevalent (this modest blog alone gets about 50 per day) that most blogging software packages have systems built-in to block it. So not only is this software doing something unethical, any comments Blog Blast does submit are just going to be blocked anyway.

For more opinions on this particular tool, see:

http://chrisbloor.com/blog/?p=29
http://zog.typepad.com/malaysia/2005/11/blog_blaster_he.html
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff166722.htm
http://www.thedeadhand.com/blogs/jscroft/archive/2005/11/27/14163.aspx

Posted in blogs and rss, grassroots promotion, search engine marketing | Comments Off