Harry Potter is Great for Blog Conversations

If you have not yet got on the bandwagon

and read the last Harry Potter book, then I suggest that you hop over to close a store and search their books until you find the seventh book in the series.

There are a lot of different ways that you can play Harry Potter on your website.  The topic gets a lot of attention and a lot of responses if you're a blogger, you're crazy to miss out on the opportunity to drawing your readers can connect on common ground.  I'm not suggesting that you throw an Amazon link up on your site to try and sell the book, I am suggesting that you use it as a conversation piece and an opportunity to get closer to your readers.

Anonymous Search from Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask?

Google's competitors are coming up with a novel approach to competing with Google. 

Offering searchers more privacy.

Google received failing grades from Privacy International last month for snooping and failing to protect searchers.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask are racing to do better than Google and to one up each other.  Promising ever shortening periods under which they will keep users search result information.  Ask is even offering up a service that would promise something akin to anonymous searches on its network.

That might make it harder for you to find personalized cups in your search related advertisements, but if you are attempting to avoid imprisonment in a Chinese jail for researching a politically taboo topic it could save your life.

Power of Privacy ~ Are you Credible?

Are you running a privacy policy on your website?

Can your visitors or customers trust you with their information?

You may not take credit cards, but emails and other forms of information are also very important.

A privacy policy can make a subtle but important statement on your website regardless of what the site is doing, how big it is or how small.

Here's a good example of a company that understands the importance of a privacy policy.  NEDC is a ISO 9001 certified fabrication company specializing in among other things Die Casting and EMI Shielding. They may not get millions of visitors per day, but they realize that its very important to make the most out of the visitors they do get and tell those visitors how they will protect their privacy.

Posting an Image in Your Blog to Make it Available in a Forum

Do you ever post an image in your blog, just so that you can hot link it in a forum and make it visible there without screwing up someone else's bandwidth?

Here's an example from the movie The Incredibles

I wanted to post this picture of Inrediboy from the movie The Incredibles in a forum next to a quote "When everyone is special, no one is special"

I didn't want to point to a site that used it for a movie review, as I didn't want to hot link to them and steal a little image bandwidth, making them pay the bill.  So instead, I loaded it up here through blogger where the image hosting is covered by Big Daddy Google.

I get a blog post with linkbait like images for future Google searches, plus the link from the forum when I hot link back to my own blog and I don't steal anyone's bandwidth that isn't prepared to pay for it.

Why Go to the Trouble?

Some webmasters have to literally pay a bandwidth overage bill if they exceed their allowed bandwidth on their self hosted site.  If you hot link one of their images and millions of people open your page to view their image, then they get a big slap in the face with a bandwidth bill and no traffic.

Unfortunately, no one has invented the concept of Bandwidth insurance yet.  You can purchase pet insurance or Funeral Insurance or even an Umbrella Policy but if you go over on your cell phone or bandwidth you are just out some money!

10 Articles You Should read to be a Successful Blogger

Performancing provides an excellent community where Pro Bloggers share their insights into blogging.

At the beginning of the week they put up a great collection of 10 articles that every blogger should read at least once(here's the link to the article).

Here are the titles of the articles

1. How to Write Magnetic Headlines
2. How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life
3. Scan-able Content
4. 10 Killer Post Ideas
5. 7 Steps to Being Recognized as an Expert
6. Converting One off Visitors to your Blog into Regular Readers
7. 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post with a Bang
8. The Art of Linkbaiting
9. Before You Begin Blogging: A few things you should know
10. 5 Surefire Steps to Increase Readership 300% (or more)

You can join Performancing for free with our invitation.