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As I’ve mentioned a few times here on Blogger Institute, simply writing quality postings is not enough to have a popular blog. Despite how interesting, in-depth, or informative your articles might be, they aren’t of any real value unless you have visitors. And to get visitors, you have to market your blog. Most of us don’t have the money it requires to seriously advertise our blog(s), so we result to social media websites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more to promote our hard work.

But, the problem many of us run into is the amount of time it takes to deal with all of these sites. I just named a few off the top of my head above and they all started running together. Between your blog(s) and life in general, you only have time to seriously use one, maybe two social networking sites to your advantage due to time restrains. It’s just impossible to use them all. Or, it was…until now.

There is a new service (free!) that will be your all-in-one social media website hub. The service is named Streamy and it’s really proving to be a very amazing tool for bloggers. First off, unlike most other “similar” services, this product is NOT a downloadble desktop application. Those only slow down your computer and eat away at your memory. With Streamy, you simply sign up, put in your information, and you’ve now got an increadible social media hub where you can view all of your social networking profiles at once, and can update them as well! No more going to Twitter, then Myspace, then Facebook, etc. You simply log in and you can post to all of them using your Streamy Dashboard. You can even chat in real time using using chat networks like AIM and Googletalk.

I’m pretty difficult to impress, but, I highly suggest Streamy for any blogger who uses social networking websites to their advantage. It’s a technological marvel. The system is set up perfectly for bloggers to share stories as well, so it’s something you really should check out.

To visit Streamy.com, click here.

If you look around for plugins that relate to “ads” for the Wordpress.org platform, you’ll find quite a few to pick from. I’ve used a few before and while they do what they intend, it’s really not worth it unless your blog has massive amounts of traffic. And if you do have massive amounts of traffic, the last thing you really need to make money are some text based ads from Google, Yahoo, etc. So where does that leave the rest of the blogging community, which is about 99% of us? Well, glad you asked!

A new plugin for the Wordpress.org platform has just been released which is entitled “Seach Ads” plugin. Unlike the other plugins that perform a similar task, this one is mildly different and more suited towards traditional smaller blogs. The really neat thing about this plugin is that the displayed ads not only are relevant to your blogs content (no more ads for cat litter on a sports blog, etc) and the ads ONLY  display to visitors who reach your blog from search engines. That way, you wont continually annoy your recurring visitors or dedicated blog readers with massive amounts of ads.

In addition to what search engines you’ll allow this plugin to work with, you can also set it up to work with social networking websites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, and Twitter.com. In other words, any type of website (or search engine) where you can be found by mass amounts of people works perfectly with this plugin.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you simply need to paste the adcode you want to use (from whatever source you might have…most people use GoogleAdsense) into the supplied box, include the domains you want to use such as Bing.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com, Twitter.com into the “Traffic Sources” text box and you’re all done. Your ads should be live within a few minutes.

A very cool and innovative plugin.

To download the plugin, click here.

Blogging, like anything, has its advantages and disadvantages. The culture we live in, especially in the United States, breeds instant gratification. I remember when I first started to blog, I figured if I had great content and used humor in my writings, I’d have thousands and thousands of readers in a matter of days. I saw what some “popular” blogs were doing - I could do the same thing. Heck, I even thought I could do it better! So while in a few weeks was I still struggling to get 10 visits a day? Simple - blogging takes time. A lot.

Creating a “poplar” blog is far from an overnight process. It takes months and years in reality to build up a blogs reputation and name to be somewhat popular. The rest of the process is mostly luck, sad as that might be to say. But, that’s not to say you can’t make your own luck, right?

The one thing that is so vitally important that bloggers must learn, especially new bloggers, is patience. Making a blog successful takes such a large amount of work, it’s almost like another job in reality…and the reward is slow, extremely slow at times. It’s only human nature to get discouraged, but don’t. The key to building a successful blog is fighting through the slumps - not giving up! Continue to write…continue to promote….continue to advertise your blog, despite your mind telling you it’s not worth it. I’ve personally dealt with this issue, and succeeded in the face of blog adversity by promoting and posting even though my fingers refused to type. In the end, while it was months down the road, my hard work paid off and  I had over 5,000 daily visitors. Quite an impressive jump from a couple a day, six months prior.

In short, the message is simply don’t give up. So many bloggers do, or get frustrated and stop promoting/writing serious content and end up writing for only 5-10 people a day. As long as you stay focused and understand it takes time to build a readership, you’ve won most of the blogging battle.

When it comes to blogging, there are a variety of ways you can publish your work. Many people use the default text editors in the platforms that they use (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, etc), but many people aren’t aware that you can actually publish your blog postings from a variety of e-mail providers (such as Hotmail.com) as well as from programs such as Microsoft Word.

The really neat and interesting thing about publishing your work from Microsoft Word and e-mail clients is that you can get a bit more fancy with your text. I’m not sure if you’ve visited any text websites lately, but the advancement in text has come a long way from the typical Arial and Times New Roman fonts we’re accustom to.

Below I’ve included a few of my favorite font websites which allow you to download thousands upon thousands of fonts to spice up your blog postings. You can find famous fonts (for example, Disney, McDonalds, Coca-Cola) as well as many “Wingdings” (fonts that are graphic based) along with themed fonts that will allow you to theme your blog postings for specific holidays, etc.

It’s really an easy way to improve the look of your blog without creating a lot of work.

Here is a list of some popular font websites (click the name of the site):

DaFont.com

1001 Free Fonts

FontFreak.com

Urban Fonts

Between those four above sites, you could spend hours upon hours looking for new and neat fonts to use on your blog postings (or any other documents you might want to spice up).

For those of you not sure how to install fonts, here is a simple step by step procedure.

First, find the font you want to download and proceed to download it.

Next, extract it using WinZip or WinRar (click either program name to download it)

Thirdly, go to the folder you just extracted the file to and copy it.

Lately, go to your Windows Control Panel, and then select “fonts”. Paste the file you just copied two steps above and that’s it. Next time you start Microsoft Word, it will work.