Interview With Yaro Starak About Comments to Your Blog!

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Today we have an interview with Yaro Starak. O.K., you might ask “Who is this guy?”. Yaro Starak is a young entrepreneur from Brisbane, Australia (sometimes he lives in Toronto, Canada). He is a 29 year old male – with big hair who is presently blog about Internet marketing, blogging, entrepreneurship and self development at
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

According to Yaro, he has been blogging since late 2005 and make over $10,000 a month from Enterepreneurs-Journey.com blog and over $30,000 a month from his online business in total – which by the way, is based entirely on his blog. Yaro has created, managed and sold several different Internet businesses since 1998 and currently teaches people how to make a full time income from blogging part time through his Blog Mastermind mentoring program. If you want the long story about Yaro (with pictures and his comments!) you can read his five-page bio at http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/yaro-starak-timeline/

All right, no more questions about Yaro? Let’s start the interview.

- Yaro, the focus of this interview is something all bloggers love – comments. Unfortunately most blogs, especially new blogs, receive very few real comments from real people (everyone gets spam comments though). Yaro, what is your point of view on why is it some blogs have a ton of comments while other blogs never receive any?

- Let me set something straight right now. If your blog has no traffic you will not receive
any comments. It makes sense of course, but some people don’t see the connection between these two elements. If no one is reading your blog then no one will leave comments either. Simply posting great articles to your blog is not enough – you have to *market* your blog to bring people to it.

- Sure, it makes sense – no comments = no traffic = nobody is reading your blog, right?

- Correct, understand if you don’t receive any comments to your blog it’s probably not that your content is bad or people don’t like you, it’s because you simply don’t have enough traffic. If on the other hand you do have some traffic, yet no one replies to your posts, there are ways to stimulate comments.

- Yaro, do you have some tips for our readers on how to stimulate comments?

- Yes, I sure do. And here are some of them. First of all, write articles that reference or focus on other bloggers. You will get their attention that way and there’s a good chance they will come to your blog and leave a comment as a result. Then, ask your readers a question at the end of your articles. Also, try to write about topics that stimulate conversation, such as current events (think politics, news, entertainment, marketing). Don’t be afraid to be controversial with your writing. Have a strong opinion and others with strong opinions will reply to argue or agree with you. Always be patient. Sometimes you just have to wait until the first person leaves a comment which opens the floodgates.

- Yaro, what do you think do you need to reply to all the comments, or just let them go?

- I am convinced you just have to reply to any comment and I can tell you why. A while ago I stopped actively responding to comments on my blog unless I was asked a direct question. I really had no excuse for not doing it, I was just lazy and working on other writing projects. Consequently the average number of comments on my blog entries dropped A LOT. I noticed the regular commentators stopped commenting as frequently and most conversations on my blog ended very quickly. This is really tragic for a blog and I’ll tell you why – it reduces your “Social Proof“.

- What is “Social Proof” by the way?

- Social Proof is when humans take action or make a decision based on seeing other humans doing it first. It’s sort of like an implied recommendation – if other people do it, it must be good. It’s like when you see a bunch of people all looking up at something in the sky at the same time. You can’t help but turn your head skywards and see what all the fuss is about. When first time visitors to your blog see other people making lots of comments they are more likely to decide there is something valuable at your blog and bookmark or subscribe to it and may even make a comment. This is good for blog traffic. This is social proof in action. I was very conscious of always taking part in comment conversations at my blog and consequently my readership was growing in leaps and bounds. I stopped and I noticed I hit a wall and my blog didn’t grow quite as well as it was.

I know a blogger who has a rule – she responds to every single comment made to her blog. Consequently she has developed a fantastic community around her blog and her traffic has
skyrocketed in a short period of time. Remember, comments on your blog are very important, take the time to respond to them.

P.S.: If you have a question for Yaro or need advice about blogging or business please ask in the forums (click the link below). If you have a problem or question about a product or service you have purchased from Yaro, please send an email to the address below:
http://replytoyaro.com

Thank you!
Michael B & Yaro Starak

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Happy ThanksGiving to All of You!

Image by Grant MacDonald via Flickr

And remember “Kindness gives birth to kindness” as Sophocles once said. Today I don’t want to use words but a beautiful picture by Zemanta.

Peace, Love & Joy to all of us! Michael B

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What is Zemanta?

Image via CrunchBase

Zemanta is a nice online tool which can help you to blog smarter & faster – with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more! Zemanta will put most of your blogging tasks on autopilot creating automatic links, adding associated photos, tags and related articles.

By the way, Zemanta partnered with Yahoo MyBlogLog for better blogging experience. Have you ever wondered who are the faces behind readers of your blogs? Wonder no more, as MyBlogLog provides you with a handy widgets that allows you to build a community around your blog.

Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production for any web user. Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta, which recognizes all contextual content. Zemanta then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results to the user to enrich and inform their content. What’s more, Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.

Zemanta is one of a number of semantic computing startups attempting to address the problem on how to enhance the content that a publisher authors. Zemanta attempts to answer this question by processing the text in the content in real time to suggest four things that are contextually relevant: images, stories, in-text links and tags. For now the company has focused on enhancing the content for blog publishers. However, it seems in the future, they have plans of introducing support for distribution channels such email clients and other content management systems.

“Web users now spend half their time visiting content, far outpacing time spent with search, communications and commerce”
- Online Publishers Association

Users expect rich content, rich with information revealed through links, images, illustrations, and references. When you think about it, the best Web-ready content is a carefully constructed mashup.

As users increasingly author content, forums, blogs and social networks are rapidly becoming their favorite playground for individual expression. It’s there that they are telling their stories and sharing new information, weaving in rich content elements from across the web. Zemanta wants to help you tell your stories with more insight, more impact, and more smarts than ever before-to attract and build your readership.

Zemanta uses natural language processing algorithms to process the content that a blogger authors. The semantic parsing of the blogger’s content is done in real time and searched for recommendations on the data indexed by Zemanta. The source for this indexed data is identified by Zemanta which includes blogs, Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon’s book listings, Flickr and other popular news and entertainment websites such as The New York Times, CNN among others. All this indexed content is validated of not violating any copyright laws before recommending them. The company notes that the images sometime may not be relevant to the content because of the limitations in semantic organization of the image data.

While Zemanta might lead the buzz around its launches there are a number of services that provide somewhat similar services such as: Evri, Calcais, Extensions based on Calcais (Tagaroo) among others. However the key strategic differentiator among the players in this business would be the number of widget installations, because widget is the key component that distributes the suggested content and probably will be utilized to push advertisements for monetization. The motivation for widget installation from users would be influenced by two key factors: 1. relevancy of the suggestions and 2. suggested content must be free of copyright issues. Zemanta already has these two features.

Are you ready for a new revolution in blogging?

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Visit Salzburg, Austria!

Salzburg is the third most beautiful city in Europe! Over 32,000 readers of the American travel magazine Conde Nast Traveller chose Salzburg, together with Venice, Florence and Rome, as the third most beautiful city in Europe.

To visit Salzburg is to delve into a world of beauty, a magnificent past and an exciting present. No matter how you encounter this world-famous city for the first time, it will always be a very special experience. Located in the “heart of Europe”, Salzburg is easily accessed from all directions.

Welcome to the city of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Salzburg Festival and the magnificent buildings that dominate its unique cityscape. The harmony between the architecture and the landscape with its mountains and lakes captivates visitors by providing an unparalleled atmosphere. Experience the charm and splendor.
Maybe it will be love at first sight.
Who knows?

Enjoy X-Mas in Salzburg this year!

Michael B