I've become a blog "evangelist" at IdeaStar, encouraging creation of two new blogs - IdeaStar: The Flipside and InsuraTech. The "voice" of a blog is very important - who is speaking and what is message? We decided "voice" for IdeaStar blog should be in third person reporting on humorous, quirky and personal side of our company. Through blog, our clients, prospects and business associates can get to know us personally. This is important for service companies like IdeaStar. We leave more formal stuff for our Web site and e-newsletter.

The other blog, InsuraTech, is written in first person. Mike Wise, IdeaStar Vice President of Insurance Technologies, presents his thoughts, real-world observations, and examples - good and bad - regarding use of Internet technology in insurance industry. IdeaStar built a national reputation in insurance community for its excellence in Web-enabling services. The blog helps to establish Mike as an expert and opinion leader. As number of posts grow, we expect a dialogue to begin within market.

I began my own blog in earnest over a year ago. It is a personal blog. I post photography, reviews of music or gadgets, and some social commentary. But most important, my blog serves as a way for me to understand this new tool from a user's perspective.

For example, I posted some pictures I took of Cleveland Cavaliers. As usual, I captioned each shot, including one of Lebron James. That particular photo was captioned, "This would make a great wallpaper." Within a couple days, my blog was in top ten on Google for Lebron James wallpaper. That is fantastic from a marketer's perspective. (But not from a personal one. I took picture down next day.)

Like Internet itself 10 years ago, blogs are here to stay. Figuring out how to produce an effective blog takes practice. It is better to get your hands around this new technology now and see what it does rather than wait. If you don't there will be next climatic technology revolution with a silly name for us to learn.

Zeus: An excellent way of improving link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other sites that are related to yours. However, main problem with this method is sheer amount of time that is involved in identifying sites that you want to exchange links with. You may often find that number of links that you manage to get is not worth time that you spent in trying to get those links. Zeus will allow you to locate and exchange links with sites that are related to yours and manage those links on an ongoing basis in a fraction of time it would take for you to do it manually.

You can download a free trial version of Zeus at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?5043&zeus/ While program does take a while to get used to, results that you can obtain with it are simply phenomenal. We highly recommend that you download free trial version and try it out.

In fact, we recommend that you use both Optilink and Zeus as they are complementary to each other - while Zeus helps you quickly locate hundreds of potential link partners, Optilink tells you which of these sites are worth getting links from and which of these sites you should avoid.

Agent Web Ranking: Once you have optimized your site for search engines, you will need to continuously check your site's rankings. We have found Agent Web Ranking to be most reliable tool for telling us how our clients' sites rank in search engines. Apart from major U.S. based search engines, it also supports plenty of European search engines. One problem with most such position reporting software is fact that search engines constantly change way they display their search results. This means that most position reporting software get outdated very quickly and it often takes an unacceptably long time for company producing software to prepare an update. However, Agent Web Ranking is only program which has a guaranteed 72 hour turnaround time - i.e. if any search engine changes way it is displaying results, it will have an update for that engine within 72 hours or less. You can find more information on Agent Web Ranking at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?5043&agentwebranking/

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