I had something really cool happen to me: I had someone contact me and requested email updates when my blog is updated! Unfortunately I am not Internet savvy enough to figure that out on my own so I went searching for something that could help me out.

During my search I found Zookoda, which is a great marketing service available to bloggers. Zookoda enables blog authors to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitor’s inbox. Best of all, it's completely free! The program offers a lot of great features like custom newsletter subscription forms to enhance your blog, offers newsletter designs to match individual blog designs, schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week, or month, and access mobile users by email blog content in text format. Zookoda also offers real-time reports to ensure that bloggers are informed about email success and blog visitor habits. Each email is tracked during delivery, providing open, bounce and click through information. What a concept!

So, not only does Zookoda help market your blog, it also helps keep all the information straight and easily accessible. I don't think it can get much easier than that... and it's free so you won’t lose a dime!  Sign up today and see all the wonderful things that can be done to market your blog. It only takes a minute, and the benefits you receive from taking a few moments to do this are priceless, especially since the service is free!

Thank goodness! There’s finally a ranking system that reflects the real score of my blog!

I got penalized by Google in the beginning of the year because I have some sponsored posts on my blog and I lost my page rank that I worked months to acquire. Not only did that mess up my whole blog system, but it really hurt me in regards to the extra money I had been making. To a lot of people $100 or so a week isn’t a big deal, but to us it meant a lot. The weeks when Sean didn’t get paid it sometimes made the difference between making a car payment or not. That’s huge!

Now there’s Real Rank, a system that was created by using real data to calculate which blogs are getting the most traffic and have the most influence on the web, such as webpages linked to the specific blog (otherwise known as inbound and outbound links). IZEARanks ranks the top blogs in the blogosphere via actual site statistics, not an “inturprutation” of estimates. This great ranking system, IZEARanks, even has a page where you can see how your blog relates to other registered blogs in real time, and offers a graph for visual people like me who don’t really “get” numbers.

Thank goodness this system has come about! Maybe now I can get back into the paid for blogging market. I’ve missed it, because it’s such a win-win situation for everyone involved. Advertisers get exposure and bloggers get to do what they love to do. How can you beat that?