Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

It can be useful to find out exactly how many comments your blog has recieved and meassure that against the comments you have made on other blogs. This week we've discussed why comments are important and made suggestions on compelling people to comment. Today Dan Smith discusses the importance of taking the time to let someone know you're reading, with a comment.

A critical component in getting readers to comment on your blog is for you to go out and comment on other people’s blogs. It’s the “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” principle and mindset. If you go out of your way to leave a thought-provoking comment on someone else’s blog with a link back to your blog, that blogger is exceedingly more likely to come visit your blog and return the favor with a comment of their own. You are engaging a blogger in interaction, and most bloggers want to be thus engaged. You’re a blogger – don’t you? I know I do.

It’s like living in a neighborhood. Somebody has to make the first move to befriend a neighbor – it doesn’t just happen mystically. If I pay a quick visit to a neighbor 5 doors down, leaving a plate of cookies, or a card, or a pair of tickets to the local AAA baseball game, that neighbor is much more likely to receptive to you and seek to do similar things for you. But it’s got to start with someone, and that someone may as well be you.

What do you think?

Yesterday Easton Ellsworth outline reasons comments are valuable. Today, Kimberlee Morrison offers a few suggestions on ways to compell people to comment on your blog posts.

Ask Questions. One great way to get people to contribute to the conversation is to ask a question. Pull people in with a question as the title of your article and state your opinion and then ask your readers what they think. One Know More Media author, Bill Belew ends every article by asking “What do you think” and while it may not work all the time, but I can assure you that it works some of the time.

This week on Blog Chalk Talk, we're going to discuss blog comments - why they matter and how to get more of them. Easton Ellsworth lays out the basics of why comments are important to your blog.

1. Commenters can become guest bloggers. This month, Know More Media is offering a bonus pool of $300 that you can dive into in just by having some folks do guest posts at your blog. What better place to start inviting them than 

2. Comments can enhance the value and authority of your blog. Many people judge a blog in part by the number of comments it typically receives.

In this final installment of this week's series on copyright, Dan Smith, shares rules for the fair use of images.

This week we’ve been talking about copyrights as they pertain to our online literary world—Easton and Kimberlee have supplied us with excellent education and guidelines regarding copyrights and content attribution, mostly as it relates to the written word. Here I will focus on images; where to find free images and 3 rules of thumb.

Where to Find Free Images

Usually the first place I go to find free images is Google images search (http://images.google.com/). Since Google mages just provides a list of images from anywhere on the web, be careful to ensure that any image you use from Google images is not copyrighted (which should be obviously stated in conjunction with the original source of the image). If it’s copyrighted, don’t use it. Similarly, Yahoo images search (http://images.search.yahoo.com/) is useful, though I prefer Google.

There are also a few other excellent sites out there that contain literally thousands of free images—great images, too—that you can use in any of your posts without worrying about license or copyright. In order of my favorites, they are:

1. www.sxc.hu – you need to register for this, but it is free
2. www.imageafter.com
3. www.morguefile.com

And now the 3 rules for you to remember:

Continuing our series on copyright, this installment is courtesy of Kimberlee Morrison, Know More Media Editor and author of VinylNotes.

As authors, all we have to protect us from having our work stolen by someone else is our copyright. Theoretically as soon as you create something it is copyrighted by default as soon as you create it. The only time you would possibly need to have a registered copyright is if you need to defend your copyright it court. The good thing about writing online is that you always have proof of when your content was created, and that works in your favor whether your copyright is registered or not.

You want to make sure you avoid even the appearance of plagiarism. Just as you would want anyone quoting you or using your work as a reference to give you proper attribution, you should give others the same courtesy. Easton outlined five basic points about copyright, but I wanted to delve into it a little farther. There are several rules you want to follow when quoting a source.