This is an excellent Search Engine Marketing opportunity for all merchants motivated to write unique content to attract new customers. Simply write up a short article with your own unique content, submit it to AffSphere.com, and generate exposure for your business, traffic, AND eight possible ways to automattically produce residual income.

To learn more, start at AffSphere.com

For example, if you are a landscaper in Portland Oregon, why spend your SEO efforts and budgets to compete with other “Landscapers” – especially since that must always be a locally provided service — when you would be found by many more customers searching for landscapers in Porland Oregon.

Thanks to John Alexander for bringing to our attention a recent study by Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing compiling the responses of 20 experts active in the Local Search Marketing on 47 criteria with respect to their influence on ranking factors in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms.

See the results of this study here:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites — Without requiring coding experience!

“Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect … any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.”

• Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
• Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
• No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

If you’d like to read Google’s press release, here it is:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080512_friend_connect.html

For more information, example (beta) sites, and to sign up for a preview release:
http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/intro

We have signed up for a preview release and are awaiting Google’s invitation. We’ll let you know when we get to start using it on this site so that you can see it in action here.

The latest community that we have been excited about is the Website Development Community provided by the v7network.

There are many of the same great, knowlegible folks here as are on the Website Guru forum, but the Website Development Community is a more “mature” forum ( it’s been around longer and has more seasoned contributors ) and we are finding it much more interesting.

Thre are simply more interesting topics for us to reply to here, and for our clients, we think you will find many more experienced opinions in response to your questions.

Some of the major topics include:

• Marketing Forum
• SEO Forum
• Google Forum
• Web Directory Issues
• Webmaster Revenue
• Blogging Forum
• Blog Promotion
• Web Design Lobby
• Graphic Design Forum
• Web Hosting Forum
• Domain Name Forum

And as usual, you will find our posts under the user name Sean@WMS ( yeah, it’s just me doing all of these forum posts . . .  but with the benefit of our WMS team’s insight into the issues we address ).

ExpressLane was developed to fit a particular niche of merchants who are small and need something more complex than our Quick Checkout Form, something more professional than PayPal, yet something less robust and expenssive than our “top shelf” shopping carts.

We have also found that merchants in this niche

• need a very simple, entry-level solution just as easy to integrate as PayPal “Buy Now” buttons on their site
• have websites already developed and don’t wan’t to have to “squeeze” their designs into a shopping cart template.
• need a shopping cart solution that can be easily custmized to their secific needs.

Read more about this FREE shopping cart here:

ExpressLane — the FREE ASP Shopping Cart

read more | digg story

Once you have decided that blogging for business is an appropriate approach for your business, and you have decided that hosting your own blog is what you want . . . the next consideration to take into account is what URI to use for your blog.

That is, will your blog be hosted via a subdirectory on a hosting account and domain name you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a subdomain related to the domain you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a completely different domain name . . . . and maybe even on a completely different server and/or host provider?

Your eyes might already be rolling . . . . Admittedly, this is rather technical information to make your decision upon.

So let’s start with the differences between these variations in general first, and then apply this understanding to what to do with your blog.

First of all, you probably already have a website for your business ( we’re rather assuming you do have ) — for the sake of illustration, let’s call it MyDomain.com.

There are two things you can do here in relation to your already existing domain name and website hosted under this domain name:

1. You could host your blog as a subdirectory of your existing website. For example, www.MyDomain.com/MyBlog. This approach is very simple, as a subdirectory is really nothing more than a folder in your web root directory and a URI that references that folder. You probably have quite a number of subdirectories on our existing website already. This is really not much different at all.
    
2. You could host your blog as a subdomain of your existing domain. For example, MyBlog.MyDomain.com. This approach is just a little more complex. For one thing, your subdomain could actually have its DNS zone records point at a completely different server or host provider. That is a potentially interesting option, but in this article, we are just going to focus on this option vis a vis your currently hosted web site.A subdomain on your currently hosted website is really just another folder ( like a subdirectory is ) but with its own DNS zone records. That is, with a subdomain, what is in your web root’s /MyBlog/ folder is handled as if it were its own domain, namely MyBlog.Mydomain.com.
    
3. You could host your blog as a separate domain entirely. For example, MyBlogDomain.com or to make this illustration even more clear, SomeCompletelyDiffrentDomainName.com — get the picture? It’s a completely different domain name.Typically, this means you will also have a completely different hosting location for this site, whether it’s on the same server or hosting provider as your main website or a completely different host altogether.

Of these three options, how do you decide which is best for you?

Admittedly, the real answers are going to depend upon your current web host provider — at least for the first two options above; the third option is really pretty wide open, but there are branding considerations, etc. to consider.

Let’s look at a brief cost/benefit analysis and other considerations on each of these options.

Subdirectory

This is by far the most simple approach. Nothing is really much different than what you are already currently doing with your website, know it or not. Your blog is simply set up in a folder of your web root. It is not isolated from your main website in any way ( which, frankly can be both good AND bad, but that’s more advanced than we will address in this article ).

From a maintenance perspective, this is very easy to manage ( frankly, you’ll manage 90-100% of your blog from a web-based interface anyway ). And from a hosting perspective, it’s just part of your website; nothing special here either.

But here is the most important consideration: From a Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing perspective, your blog would be part of your main website. Now that is value natural; it’s neither “good” nor “bad”; it just depends on what you want to accomplish through your blog.

For example, if what you are trying to accomplish is to build up content on your existing site, then this is a good way to do it. You will build, over time, content in various “regions” of your site that will build information and authority on the topics you address on your site, all the while preserving your brand and site identity — at the end of the day, it’s ALL YOUR website here.

Subdomain

This approach is also pretty simple. Most things are not much different than what your are already currently doing with your website. Your blog files will still reside within a folder of your web root, but your blog will NOT resolve this way in a browser — it will be essentially another website. That is, unlike the subdirectory option, your blog would not be located at www.MyDomain.com/MyBlog/, but rather MyBlog.MyDomain.com.

From a maintenance perspective, this is equally easy to manage, and from a hosting perspective, it should still just be part of your website — though with special DNS zone records configured.

The important consideration here from a Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing perspective here, though, is that search engines will consider this a different website.

So, if what you are trying to accomplish here is to build up content in your subject areas while also building an “authority” location for your subjects which link back to your main web site, then this is the way to go — assuming you also want to preserve your branding via URI’s. That is, you are more concerned about linking back to your main website for that relevance than you are about building up content relevancy on your main website.

Another point we might venture here is that you might want to keep your content on your main website within a certain scope while utilizing your blog to expand that scope of content. That is, you might not want to be constantly adding new pages to your main website while at the same time you want to take advantage of the flexibility of blogging to expand your content on “another website” you control that is linking back to the content on your main website.

A Completely Different Domain

From the most simple perspective, hosting your blog under a completely different domain name has many of the advantages of both of the above options . . . . but at the cost of losing your branding.

With this approach, you have a completely different domain name — in no way related to the DNS of your main website; it’s just completely different. This means you can easily host it anywhere either with your current web host provider or with any other web host provider. It’s just a completely different website.

From a maintenance perspective, you are simply managing another site altogether.

From a Search Engine Optimization or Internet Marketing perspective, it is again a completely different website and has all of the benefits of the Subdomain option.

Take away:

When choosing how to reference and host your blog — via subdirectory, subdomain, or completely different domain, you have choices. You also have considerations to take into account, and these considerations will have an impact on what you are trying to accomplish with your blog.

We hope this discussion will help you make your decision, but if you want to know more, please contact us or request a quote.

So, “how do I get started”, you ask.

Excellent question, and there are some important considerations to take into account before you do.

First and foremost, you need to understand the difference between hosted solutions and hosting your own application. There are advantages and disadvantages to both — as with pretty much everything in business, there is a cost-benefit analysis you will need to determine.

Hosted solutions

The biggest advantage of using a hosted solution such as Google’s Blogger.com or Automatic’s WordPress.com is that these are free, you can get up and running very quickly, all of the application software is managed on the host side . . . so you have quick setup and ease of use.

The biggest disadvantages of using a hosted solution is that you do not have much control over your blog — most especially control over features, how your pages look, plug-ins you might want to use to enhance your blog and interaction with end-users, or customizations you might want to make to your layout and functionality.

Hosting your own application

The greatest advantage to hosting your our application is that you have total control over it.

However, this approach may not be free ( it will need to be hosted somewhere ), it may not be a quick to launch ( as you my need a developer to install, set up, configure, and customize ), and it will be up to you or your developer to manage updates to the core application and it’s plug-ins and customizations. Honestly, if you are not considerably experienced in a wide variety of application development platforms, are not familiar with making backups of your database, etc., you will probably need to contract a developer to get your blog up and running for you and to manage upgrades to the core application and plug-ins.

In our experienced opinion, though, it’s almost always best to have full control of your application — no matter what the application, blog, shopping cart, CMS, etc. or otherwise — rather than use 3rd party hosted solutions. One might get started or “dip a toe” into an new concept using free, 3rd party solutions . . . . but every “serious” business will sooner than later hit that moment when you find that you need to control you own application.

Cost/Benefit

If you are just wanting to dip your toes into the water and experiment which the concept of blogging, then you might want to start with a free, 3rd party hosted option.

However, if and/or when you get serious about blogging, you will will almost certainly want to host your own application and realize enough advantages from that approach.

WMS will be happy to help you either way. Just contact us or request a quote.

We had been working on issues getting the WordPress plug-in, Subscribe2, to work on our blog for several weeks to no avail . . . and were waiting for their imminent release of version 4.5 hoping that would solve our problems. It didn’t; infact, we pretty much crashed our backend by upgrading to it.

However, we also finally figured out that one of the reasons we couldn’t get one of the most important aspects of this plug-in to work was because the WYSIWYG editor in WP 2.3 was wrapping paragraph tags around the code snipet to plug in the Subscribe2 subscribe form, while the plug-in very explicitely requires that this code snipet be bounded by an empty line above and below it.

So, we figured “let’s upgrade to WordPress 2.5, as that just was released too, and Subscribe2 had already tested against it”.

The good news is that that the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 was a snap and that the code snipet for Subscribe2 FINALLY works . . . . but not much of anything else in Subscribe2 does . . . . and we also found a conflict between Subscribe2 and CForms II plug-ins . . . . so, at the end of the day, we’re about one step forward, and two steps back.

We are hoping and expecting to get all of this ironed out in the coming week so that we can begin upgrading client blogs.