BagWhiz, a blog about luxury handbags and bag reviews, was just launched by our blog network.

You will find interesting stuff like Coach Bags, Fendi Bags, LV Bags, and more.

The bag blog is currently lead by one of our bloggers Lilian.

We are looking for any bag-addicted bloggers out there, if anyone is interested in blogging for pay (for BagWhiz.com), please send your resume and sample blog posts to zedomax [at] gmail.com.

It seems like some of the bloggers on blogger.com with anti-obama blogs have been blocked.

Personally, I don’t have a political opinion here but it looks like Google is marking those blogs as “spam”.

I am not sure what Google’s policies are on political blogs but just as an advice, I wouldn’t host my blog on blogger if I seriously wanted a “free voice” or freedom.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Heck, the funny thing is, supporters of Clinton should now be supporting Obama, what is happening???

Well, we will leave that up to you to decide.

via nytimes

Well, this one’s pretty simple but a lot of people forget to put nofollow on links that are going out.

I don’t mean you should put nofollow on blogroll links but links like feedburner, flickr, and other free services you link to.

Don’t simply copy and paste as you are giving away valuable Pagerank to those free sites.

Well, that’s if you want to keep your PageRank as high as possible.  It’s pretty much pointless to put a nofollow on those links anyways.

I know, I know, you want to thank those sites that give you the free service but realize that every link is valuable and if you are serious about gaining traction in the internet world, you should really pay attention here. Besides, those free services probably already got millions of free links from other bloggers who don’t give a shi*.  I am just telling you if you do give a shi*.

Why do people forget about this simple fact?

Well, because most of the time, you end up copying and pasting the code from those free service sites.  Now remember they don’t have a ToS that says you need to put a do-follow link in order to use their services.  It’s only fair for you as a blogger to protect your Pagerank from going out to links like that.  It’s actually very important that you watch out where your outlinks are going to as it will determine the number of search engine traffic you receive over the long term.

Now, don’t tell me you are on the do-follow campaign, that’s just something I won’t get into but it’s only hurting your blog.  I think it’s smarter to play the safe side and make sure your do-follow links are only to those sites that you want it to go out and keep everything else, as I said before, a no-follow folks.

I maybe right or wrong but you might as well be safe than sorry.

China, a country known to control their citizens’ internet, has just allowed some leniency for bloggers to blog about the earthquake.  Great, freedom when there’s crisis and none when there isn’t.  Maybe they do care…

Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant message across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

“Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?” one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

“How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful,” read another.

China is now home to the world’s largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, and their hunger for quake news is forcing the government to let information flow in ways it hasn’t before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a powerful source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

“I don’t want to use the word transparent, but it’s less censored, an almost free flow of discussion,” said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley,

via mashable

(click to enlarge)

To prove that quantity rules in the blogging world, I averaged about 5-10 blog posts per day on this site, Zedomax.net over the last week or so.

Before that, I rarely updated the site and wasn’t trying to bring any traffic.

As you can see, with lots of hard work blogging, you can easily go from 20-30 visitors to 200-300 visitors within a week or two as seen in the above statcounter graph.

Now, my next goal is to hit around 500-1000 visitors within the next 2 weeks. I probably won’t achieve it but it’s a good goal.  On the other hand, there is also good chance I just might get there if I push to 24 blog posts per day.

Another secret I can tell you about why “quantity” works is that Google search engine is “all” about finding new information fast and giving that to the consumers.

The reason why the top 100 bloggers have minimum of 24 posts per day is because our world is full of information. Think of how many new things that happen daily. Do you think you can cover all the new information in just 24 blog posts? No, the answer is that who ever is providing new information quicker to the search engines will get a boost in traffic from the people who search for that information.

Now, the secret is, “you gotta blog about something new”.

If you look carefully, almost every blog post on this blog was about some new company that launched something. Next time someone wants to find out about that new company, guess who’s getting that traffic?

Well, enough about blogging secrets, you will have to wait till next time for more. Make sure to subscribe to the blog!

Holy crap. People “were” talking about how traditional media would be trying to take over blogs. Well, CNET (CNET) isn’t really a blog but still, this is a sign bloggers must work together so traditional media doesn’t take over the blogsphere.  CBS (CBS) is really trying hard though to grab a big share of the online market as they have been really best “offline” in the past.

And that symmetry is apparently worth about $1.8 billion, which is what CBS just agreed to pay for CNET. The deals values CNET at $11.50/share, and puts a 45% premium on stock from their closing price yesterday. CBS, which is worth a little over $16 billion, is down just over 3% on the news as of 7:45 am PST. Silicon Alley Insider was among the first to break the news.

“The core businesses of CNET Networks and CBS Interactive represent near perfect category symmetry in premium online content,”
Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive.

Here’s my interpretation of CBS President, “By taking over CNET, we will have more chance to increase our online visibility and take over the blogsphere eventually.”  Well, I might be over-reacting but you can enjoy some humor.

via techcrunch

I did a post about Yahoo Buzz when it came out couple months ago over at our Dot Com site, it looks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Yahoo Buzz might be way bigger than Digg after all.

Digg will still hold its traffic as it has been steady with a large number of bloggers using the service.

For Yahoo Buzz to get even more popular, they need to open it up to all the bloggers, not just via invites.

I am sure this will happen soon and Yahoo Buzz might take a big share of the social networking market.

Furthermore, Yahoo Buzz has a more diverse audience than Digg. While Digg’s young, male, techy audience has been the stuff of legend since the site’s beginnings, 51% of Yahoo Buzz’s visitors are women. This doesn’t matter much to the users but it does matter a great deal to the advertisers; another legend has it that diggers never click on ads, and this might not hold true for Yahoo Buzz.

via mashable

Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, is working on blacklisting spammers. Well, they have been blacklisting spammers before but now I guess they are just more open about it.

What does this do for you?

Nothing, just twitt along and hope that the Twitter team will figure it out soon or later.

I don’t use twitter so often anymore due to the number of spam on my twitter. I hope this new blacklisting feature works out so I can use it more often.

There’s also an unofficial twitter blacklist made by someone…

Here’s an excert from the Twitter people:

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.

To this I say, “wow, you guys ARE slow!”, simply because I have seen twitterpam about a year ago before it got popular among the top bloggers.

via techcrunch

Remember my last post about Quality vs. Quantity?

Well, after doing some testing with most of my blogs, it’s clear now that content isn’t everything.  Quantity can bring you stability of a blog’s growth while Quality can bring you a high number of niche readers.

Why do you ask?

Because content is great, only if you can couple that with great internet marketing.

You can compare to real life business.

For example, you have the greatest product in the world but no one knows about you and you end up selling very few.

It’s the same thing in the blogging world. I know many great bloggers with the highest quality content, yet their traffic, PageRank, and readership never grows over time because they don’t market themselves.

The best way for someone who is not already famous is to blog a LOT. I don’t mean to create splogs but do create original content but you must blog a LOT.

How much is blogging a lot?

Well, if you want to be serious about making money blogging or getting ahead of competition, you have to at least blog as much as your competition. You look at the Top 100 blogs in the world, they all blog no less than 24 posts per day, 1 per hour. I personally do find 1 per hour is most optimal.

If you are not John Chow and you do not already have 20K RSS readership nor 6K unique visitors per day, there is no way you will ever grow in traffic and SEO unless you start blogging like crazy.

Of course, there are always exceptions.  If you are already famous, you are a total expert on your topic, or you simply know “internet marketing”.  If that’s the case, that’s fine but if not, I highly suggest you start blogging at least 3 to 5 posts per day minimum.

Those big bloggers will beat you down and no one will hear your voice unless you can keep up with their blogging pace.

Now, if you ignore my advice and you do 1 or 2 posts per day, you will probably be okay too. (It might take you longer to reach the same goals)

24 posts per day is definitely recommended for all you bloggers serious about going “pro”.  If your topic is hard to write so many posts per day, then do focus on “fun” content.  No one likes to read a Master’s Thesis, but everyone likes a joke, humor, or something to take their mind off the long day.