The Link Medic - Free Blogging Resources

Profit Jackpot Review - The Truth About Autoblogging

Profit Jackpot is one of those flashy named bundles of internet marketing software designed by Anik Signal an internet marketing super star who's made more money than you could imagine by making websites.

I always check out what Anik is offering because basically the guy is talented and really brings ground breaking methods to the table.

Apart from this blog I have several others set up for the purpose of generating some extra cash, networking and traffic. I built them myself and it's taken a lot of time.

What Profit Jackpot does in a nutshell is allows virtually anyone to do what I did without spending as much time and granted effort.

7 Reasons You Should Use #Hashtags In Your Tweets

A hashtag is simply a keyword marked by the # symbol in front of it.

In some geekier circles it's known as an octothorp, which might be good to know if you're appearing on Jeopardy.

It is used to help categorize tweets and help you find similar ones using that topic's tag. This is done by clicking on the hashtag which will show all the tweets using that tag.

They are mainly used as an interactive search function and not for labeling idea they were originally invented for.

Example: Optimize your Blogger post titles for better PR in minutes with one code - http://ow.ly/391af - #blogger #SEO

I use mine on the end of the tweet but a tag could be any word in the tweet itself.

Many of you no doubt use these in every tweet but you may not know of its true potential, especially if you're not using them regularly.

Here's some reasons why #Hashtags are great!

1. One obvious reason to use them is it allows people to get a jist of what your tweet is about at a glance. Categorizing your own tweets is a good way for people to find other tweets in that topic. This is good especially if you have an ongoing series or do many follow-up posts.

2. There is always the possibility of your tag going viral and start trending on twitter, which would be too good to be true. Even if it would be a 15 minutes of fame kind of deal.

3. Paper.li is an online user-generated magazine put together largely from hashtags, it's amazing how many I've seen my posts on just because I've used the tag. I get a decent amount of hits from these user's e-zines and not only that you actually get back links while you're at it. 4. It makes your tweets easier to find and get picked up by social media tools such as Tweet Adder and Tweet Big which will lead to more hits and more followers ultimately. Clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite allow you to follow a tag, for example.

5. Takes boring plain text and adds a layer of interactivity which is what social media is all about. Not using them only stifles your tweeting prowess, tapping into the popularity of the hashtagging phenomena.

6. You can create your own hashtag of course! This is great for businesses if someone wants to follow your business by a category exclusively to your business or product. Take advantage of the #coupon craze perhaps?

7. Thanks to websites like hashtracking.com you can almost must a campaign of sorts and track the popularity, reach, and impressions to see how well a certain tagged tweet is doing.

20 Great Free PSDs For Blogging & Web Development - Vol 1

I've wrangled up some useful PSD files for web development and blogging here from around the web.

The highlight of the list is a great resource of free logos from Shaboopie, they're really well done and can easily be modified to make a new logo for just about anything.

There is also a random assortment of buttons, stickers and cool things you can use for footers.

Expect another post similar to this soon depending on it's response.

Free PSD Files for May 2011

Shaboopie features some downright awesome Free PSD logo templates ready to be edited. You can get some very pro looking logos pretty easily. In fact, I used one of these templates to create my own new logo a while back.

Empire Avenue: Social Media Never Sleeps

If you haven't heard about Empire Avenue yet it's a social media stock exchange game which allows you to invest Eeaves in brands and people and eventually make it to the top of the corporate ladder in your niche.

It launched back in July of 2010 but I've heard a lot of chatter about it lately and seems to be growing in popularity.

The goal of the game is to be successful buying and selling virtual stocks and at the same time connecting with other people and brands though the site's social media aspects such as Shout Outs, Mentions, Recommendations, Advertising, Status Updates and the various chat rooms and communities.

Proper Blog Post Format Feng Shui

Ok, not real Feng Shui but there are some established guidelines you can follow to help provide a nice environment for your readers.

Formatting a post so that it reads well should always be one of your goals when writing all of your content.

Just like a book, things need to be presented in a way that people won't get turned off at just the mere glance of your article.

There are tips to ensure this doesn't happen and it really starts with knowing some simple basics to start out with.

A typical post should be comprised a few different components, main text, images and headings.

Where and how they are implemented are important, great content can look terrible if presented in a jumbled mess.

The Formatting Arsenal of a Blogger

Images - All posts should at least have one image. There are several reasons for this, one being that it needs a functioning thumbnail of some sort. When someone goes to share your post on Facebook links with images will be clicked on more often than ones with out.

Most templates use some sort of related posts plugin with thumbnail support. If your posts never incorporate a picture then you'll be missing out in this area and be left with a blank default image.

Images should be properly floated to the right or left and have enough space for the text to wrap around them. It is also common to have one image placed at the very top of the post. These are known as your lead image and are always somewhere near the very top.

Images should never take over the post by clustering them every where. Exception being infographics and tutorial type posts.
Headings - The nice big and bold text where it says "The Formatting Arsenal..." is a heading. You use headings to break down the post into different main topics and provide space, you'll notice above my headings I have a little separator graphic, you can do this easy with CSS.

Headings are implemented with HTML using the <h2> tag but you can use the H3, H4, and so on down the line but I just prefer to stick to one. I'm not a big fan of the diminishing heading style, getting gradually smaller. In my opinion it's much better off to stick to one and use than throughout. Some will argue over this for SEO but I really don't think you need to go that far.
Bold - Using bold is a great way to grab the reader's attention if they're a scanner type of reader and just need to find the main aspects of a post. Especially if the visitor has come from a search engine chances are they're most likely trying to find what they need rather quickly. Thus having big blocks of text with no highlighted words is not a good idea.
You'll notice in my last post about submitting your blog to a service to get more traffic I put some bold text near the link as most people will be looking for that right off the bat.
Lists - You start to see where this is going don't ya? I'm already using all of these things to my advantage for this very post. People love lists and for good reason, they're a great way to keep your ideas organized. As you can see I'm using a list to show all the various tools one can use. Each one is in bold so you can quickly get the fundamental concepts at a glance then delve deeper if you wish.

Lists are sometimes clunky to put together in the Compose mode so to create a list using HTML follow this code here.
Basic List HTML code:

<ul>
<li>Number 1</li>
<li>Number 2</li>
</ul>
Spacing - One thing you do not want to over look is the space in-between all of these elements. I'm constantly using as much space as possible, not to cheat to make a longer post but it makes for a quicker read which is what most readers prefer.

Putting It All Together

Visitors will appreciate the use of a consistent format and come to expect it. If formatting hasn't been something you've paid much attention to developing your own style today and sticking to it will do wonders in the long run.

You may even notice your RSS Subscribers increase because poorly formatted blog posts are sometimes hard to read through RSS Readers.

So ask yourself do you follow a format every time you write?

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Gain Extra Traffic By Submitting Your Blog To Zemanta

Zemanta is a brilliant blogging tool made for Chrome and Firefox that allows bloggers to enhance their blog posts as they write.

It works on a number of blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr, LiveJournal and more.

A sidebar (shown left) is placed next to your compose window and users can see related articles so they can link to them or check them out for research etc.

Either way that means if your blog is in the Zemanta article pool you'll get some traffic.

The good kind of traffic too, in the form of related links placed on other blogs and no doubt the blogger will come to your site and discover something they're interested in as well.

To add your blog go here: How to get your feed into Zemanta? and make sure you read the guidelines before you submit your feed.

You shouldn't have anything to worry about if you have a normal blog with original content.

It is up to them though so make sure your blog is established before considering submitting it to them.

If accepted this is a great way to extend your reach and provides more dynamic traffic than blog directories and the like.

Is Tweet Big Safe To Use?

As a sort of follow up to my post Gain Thousands of Targeted Twitter Followers With TweetBig! I will address a question I think a considerable amount of people wonder about when it comes to Tweet Big and other Twitter tools in the same vein.

Is Tweet Big safe to use? - Short answer - Yes

As someone who has been using the service since its start and taking advantage of all it has to offer I can for certain say that Tweet Big is a great and powerful tool that is completely safe.

When it comes to follower tools out there this one is probably the most legit.

As with anything moderation is key, that's not to say you can't get several hundred new followers a day using it's highly targeted follow functions. You just set up an initial group of users similar to you and let it go to work. It's been rather worry free actually.

Just check out my stats here for yourself to see just how far my account has come.

How To Add Internal Links Automatically With Wordpress

We all know of the added benefit of placing internal links throughout your site but doing it manually can be a real pain.

That's where SEO Auto Links & Related Posts comes in handy.

Let's say you have a blog about flooring.

You're writing a post about how to install vinyl tile and you mention the different types of glue used.

You've already written an extensive article all about glue so you don't want to explain it in detail so you link to it.

With this plugin all you have to do is go to your settings and add the keyword 'glue' and the URL you want it to go to and then from now on every post you'll ever write will automatically create a link for that keyword.

On my template site you can see it in action with the keyword "admin options".

You can even go so far as to set them as dofollow or nofollow

How To Set Your Auto Links

Add all of your categories' names + links to get your new auto link archive rolling.

Setting a keyword link couldn't be any easier all you need is the word and the URL.

First you need to go into your plugins panel and find its configure link.

Enter your auto links in the box.

Type the word first then a comma and then add your URL.

You can also set the number of links it will do per keyword and change the title format. I suggest you keep it to a low number so it's not distracting, 1 or 2.

And lastly don't forget, this plugin also has a related posts function if you need it!