They provide you with a simple way to implement effective online marketing using a tutorial approach that is easy to understand. And speaking of tutorials, they have lots of those too! Everything from Copywriting to Email Marketing to SEO and more. There is a whole lot of useful information on their blog! A lot of it is geared toward bloggers, but their information is applicable to online business owners, even if you don’t have a blog (but if you don’t, why not?!).

So hop on over to their blog and check out all of their information. I recommend you subscribe today! Just click on the image (above) and that will take you directly to the Copyblogger blog.

From her ABOUT page:

At crafting an MBA, the goal is to help you polish those basic skills (like business planning and bookkeeping), develop a marketing plan (online and off), and help keep you up to date with trends in the business world – while also helping develop skills specific to a craft based business (selling online, craft shows, trade shows, and promoting your portfolio).

She also has a free eBook, The Best of Crafting an MBA, available via email, along with many wonderful tips and information on her blog for the creative-minded business owner. Just click on the image above to be taken to the CMBA blog. I guarantee you it will be difficult to not find helpful information there for your business.

I’m not sure how many of you need or use stock photography in your online business, but if you’re interested in a great resource, I often use iStockphoto. Photos are always a great way to enhance your business (or personal) blog or website and can be used in so many ways. So if you’re looking for stock photography, be sure to check out iStockphoto. Just click on the image above to go to their website. Check out what they have to offer.

Their free service is for only 100 contacts, which isn’t very much. That being said, sometimes you get what you pay for, and considering all the features Mad Mimi offers, it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a high quality mailing list service.

Also keep in mind that if you can’t pay for a mailing list service there are plenty of free alternatives. Poke around on our Mailing Lists & Newsletters page for some of those. And remember that if you have a blog, that can also be used as your newsletter, and that costs absolutely nothing.  Click the link below to read a previous post on this topic.

Use Your Blog as Your Newsletter

Happy marketing!

There’s a great article over at Spice Up Your Blog on this topic, and it provides a video for how to do it. Just click on the link below to view that very informative post.

How to Buy a Custom Domain Directly from Blogger
and Connect It to Your Blog

Custom domains are a great way to help maintain your business brand, and a way to just streamline the route to your blog, whether it’s for business or personal use.

Favicons are the small “favorite icons” (= favicons) icons that appear in the browser’s address bar. If you look up at the URL for my blog, you’ll see my favicon that looks like a little OBJ.

It’s a great little way to help with branding your blog, and your business. So if you’d like an easy way to now add one to your Blogger blog, please visit the Blogger in Draft blog link below for a tutorial on how to do just that.

Customize Your Favicon Tutorial

Wish they’d done this years ago…but better late than never!

Print Friendly offers three ways to optimize web pages before printing them, and/or can convert them to PDF format files as well. This helps to eliminate a lot of the printing of unwanted images and information that appear on web pages, such as ads, graphics, and unwanted text. You can edit the pages to print only what you want, and eliminate what you don’t.

Option 1 allows you to visit their website, enter a URL, and  then edit and print from there.

Option 2 allows you to add the Print Friendly browser tool to your browser and use it that way.

And Option 3 allows you to embed the Print Friendly feature to your website or blog by adding a snippet of javascript to your template.

I just tested out Option 3 on one of my blogs. You can see it in action here:

http://www.tatteredsisters.com/2011/03/primitive-robin-eggs-jar.html

Scroll to the bottom of that post and click on the green Print/PDF button. The PrintFriendly window will open. It will allow you to Print the page, with the option to remove images, if you like. It will allow you to save the page as a PDF. It will also allow you to email the page.  You can even adjust the text size to your liking.

The free service does display ads at the bottom of the Print Friendly window when it opens. But to me, this is not a problem. I think the service is wonderful. It will allow people to print and save pages from your site or blog very quickly and easily. Perfect for anyone wanting to save product information, or save and print patterns/tutorials, etc, if you offer them. There are lots of possibilities for its use.

So if you’re interested be sure to check it out!

When you arrive at her blog you can see the gallery in use, right under her header image and menu. It allows you to scroll through a bunch of thumbnail images, each of which is linked to the posts in her blog where the images reside. And the gallery is very customizable to be whatever size you need.

For any of you who like to feature new products on your blog, this would be an ideal way of allowing customers to see all of your products at a glance. And even if you are just a creative blogger who wants to add quick image links to all of your projects, this would work for you too. Definitely worth looking into, as it’s a great web tool for your blog.

In my last post called Link Party Anyone? I talked about joining link parties to help generate some traffic to your blog. I thought it was important that I now talk about Link Parties and SEO, and what link parties can’t do for your own blog or website’s SEO. And additionally, I’ll talk about comments and links as well.

When you join a link party, the link that you leave to your own blog or website does NOT get noticed by the search engines. Many people do not realize this; even I didn’t realize this for a long time, to be honest. Nor do most people realize that when you leave a comment on a blog along with a link to your blog or website, in most cases, that comment link also does NOT get noticed by the search engines.

In the case of link parties, widgets and java scripts generate the link party forms on a blog from the link party host (like InLinkz or LinkyTools, the two most popular link party hosts). That means that the links that are left by participants in the link party are all stored at the link party host. And those links are set to NoFollow by default, which prevents Google and other search engines from following those links. If this weren’t the case, not only could spam become a big problem, but websites could get a seriously inflated and false page rank, just by joining lots of link parties. And Google doesn’t want that.

Likewise, most blog platforms, like Blogger and the free hosted Word Press, have comments set to NoFollow by default in the template, preventing any search engines from following links left with comments. And they do this for the same reasons noted above. If you want search engines to follow the links left with comments on your own blog, you have to modify the NoFollow rule to become a DoFollow. How you do that depends upon which blog platform you use. You can also consider switching to another commenting system, one which creates DoFollow links, like CommentLuv or IntenseDebate.

Link parties and blog comment links are still a good way to get some human traffic to your business or personal blog or website, regardless of the NoFollow/DoFollow status of the blog in question. But I wanted you to be aware of the SEO aspect of link parties and comment links, so that you will understand exactly what to expect when you leave your website link in those places.

For example, on my art blog, Art Chick Studio, I recently joined a link party that was showcasing all Valentines Day themed art and craft projects. Wanna see an example of a link party that uses thumbnail images? Follow the link below.

Look at Me Link Party at Fun to Craft

There are arguments for and against the use of link parties, but for the most part it’s really just a matter of personal choice. I always enjoy checking out the other participants blogs. Some people use their link parties to host contests or for giveaway purposes. You could also use it if you sell products and want to offer your customers a way to show off how they’ve used them.  So it can be a good online marketing tool.

My personal recommendation for a link party host is InLinkz.

There are others, but I like InLinkz. It’s free for text only link party hosting. And if you want the thumbnail option you can pay just$2 per month, or $20 per year via Pay Pal. They have other subscription durations as well, something to fit any budget.  But just participating in a link party is free. So if you come across one that you want to join in on, it won’t cost you a thing. And it may get you some new traffic to your blog.