educational

Blog Happy

In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee ushered in the World Wide Web with the HTML language. At the time, the web was envisioned as a way for academics to quickly reference external documents and images (no, not those kinds of images). HTML worked wonderfully for this, but its success also transformed it. Finally, humanity had a uniform front-end, and Internet computing caught on like wildfire.

Today with billions of dollars being bought and sold on the Internet, HTML and web development is now essentially the building of complex Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that support sophisticated databases, networking and financial tasks. Standard web tools have become very complex; yet what about Berners-Lee's original vision of creating an easy way to share text and images?

This is where the idea of the blog comes in. This strange term is short for "web log" and was coined by John Barger in 1997. The blog is a return to the essence of what the web should be. Today the tools to build and maintain websites are difficult — and designed for sophisticated e-commerce and multimedia. Of course the adult webmaster needs these tools. But the blog is the realization of the easy exchange of text and images across the Internet.

With a blog, building your own adult website is as simple as sending an email. This is actually what a blog is: a posting tool. Your medium becomes a slick website interface. When using a blog, you don't need to worry about buttons, layers, fields or any HTML. All you have to do is type and post. I'm going to create a brand-new blog right now.

Let's see how long it takes: XBIZ-World.Blogspot.com.

Wow, it only took three minutes. I didn't include the login time. But as you can see, in these three minutes we have a slick template, centered bolded text, a link to the real XBIZ website and even a photograph. Of course, I will leave it to the adult webmaster to find more risqué images.

The first important component of this new blog is the link pointing to XBIZ. As we know, search engines will rank your site on popularity. This means the more sites that have a link to your site, the higher-ranked your website will be with the large search engines. If you consider the above blog, we have just increased the popularity of XBIZ.com. Today or tomorrow, Google will spider this site and increase the weight given to the URL.

This is the first great strategy of blogging. I call it the "funnel strategy." Let's say you own a website called KansasFarmGirls.com. Of course, your revenue will depend on traffic. With blogs, you can create a funnel to increase traffic by simply building a number of blogs around your original website with themes and keywords that your clients lust after. All of these blogs will have links to your original site and thus will increase your traffic and popularity.

The second important component of this new XBIZ World blog is the image. In this case, our image wouldn't attract the attention of the tamest moralist (even though I noticed the trees were nude). Yet we all know an adult webmaster is never going to lure the lustful masses to his blog with a nature shot. On the other hand, posting adult content is against the rules of many hosting services. Therefore, in the world of blog images, the adult webmaster needs to walk a fine line and read the terms of agreement provided by each hosting service.

When creating an adult blog that points to your website, make sure that either you have a free adult blog hosting service like Thumblogger.com or that you are posting sexy but tamer material on your mainstream blogs to lure customers to your more revealing wares.

Mainstream blogs, like Google's Blogspot.com, will obviously be trafficked more than adult blog hosting sites; therefore the adult webmaster should create both types of blogs when funneling customers to his or her website.

Don't assume Google's Blogspot is so tame. It's full of bloggers much bolder than I was. Here is a blog built by a "Lolita" into bondage, LolitaWolf.Blogspot.com. Wilder than her site, is a blog of a couple into bondage:

EverythingOze.Blogspot.com. This second blog also contains nudity and might be removed from Blogspot someday. Both of these blogs could have been portals to your adult website, searchable and with many links to your content. So what are you waiting for?

Instead of "submitting" your site to search engines, you "ping" them. It is important after you create your blog to have it pinged on a regular basis to the blog search engines, which in turn are spidered by the larger search engines like Google, Yahoo and Inktomi. One example of a good site to help you ping your blogs is Pingomatic.com.

The great thing about ping technology, as opposed to search engine submissions, is that most ping services have HTML snippets that you can include in your blog so that whenever you create a new post, a ping is sent to the blog search engines automatically. In the world of blogs and pinging, it is the blogs with the most posts and the most recent posts that get the highest ranking and respect.

A blog is an active diary. If you are an adult webmaster, each sexy model you feature should have his or her own blog. One tricky aspect of having your blog pinged is that blogs are really viewed by the world in two forms. The first form is: XBIZ-World.Blogspot.com. This is a simple URL. Yet in the world of blogging, there is now another term: "the feed," which is a pipe that grabs the HTML on your page and allows blog search engines to display your content or preview it directly.

When you are pinging to the blog search engines, sometimes you are asked for the URL and sometimes the feed. The blog feed is usually an extension of the URL. In this case, it would be XBIZ-World.Blogspot.com/ feeds/posts/default. It is important not to submit the feed when the pinging service wants a URL or your beautiful erotic blog will read like a boring course on bad-HTML practices. Most feeds are either RSS feeds or Atom feeds, simply two different formats to do the same thing — feeding raw HTML.

The one tricky artistic fact about blog posting is that when you post into a blog, you are inserting into a "stack." A stack is like a stack of pancakes: the last post will appear first. If you are creating a static blog and make four posts, users will see posts No. 4, 3, 2 and 1 in that order. If your first post is the one you want everyone to focus on and post No. 4 is simply a list of links, then you need to post 4, 3, 2, 1 so the most important and flashy post is first.

Wild Blogs
Don't fret over the many restrictions blog-hosting companies have erected around adult content. If you want a wild, steamy X-rated blog, there is still a place for you. Most good blogging sites allow you to export your blogs to your own hosting service that may have more lenient rules regarding content.

Because disk space is so cheap these days, the adult webmaster could build a number of legitimate blogs and simply move them to his or her website using an online blogging tool. Once safe on your hosting service, the blogs can be modified for kinkier content. In our above example, XBIZWorld.Blogspot.com, this blog could have been hosted anywhere. Still, the adult webmaster needs to check TOS agreements when doing this.

If you wish to avoid the large blog-hosting restrictions when designing blog content, you can simply acquire your own blog software and upload your blogs to your server without the need to worry about further TOS agreements. Of course, you will have to set your own URL naming conventions when bringing the blogs online.

One useful free blog software offering is Bblog, a PHP-based blogging tool that can be downloaded at Bblog.com. This tool supports "tracebacks," which means "links" in blogging lingo. With a traceback, you can link to relevant content on other web pages or blogs — yet unlike a link, the traceback is alive. When your blog is pinged by blog search engines a list of your tracebacks also is searched and pinged back to the blog you are referring to, thus increasing your visibility.

The great thing about the world of blogging is that it is fun and easy. Anyone can create a blog, not only webmasters or tech geeks. This fact, along with the popularity of blogs, makes them an essential component for any adult webmaster that wishes to increase traffic, visibility and revenue.

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