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The internet marketing community is buzzing about blog advertising. But there are still many folks who are wondering just what blog advertising is.

Before you can begin to define blog advertising it is important to establish what a blog is. A blog is a web log or web diary. Or at least that is how it started. But blogging has evolved into something much more while there are still millions (or billions) of folks starting and operating traditional web logs.

A blog is a web site that is easy to start and maintain because blogging is about content and not the system that supports it which is what attracts many web novices to the format. Blogs make it easy to have a site up and running in minutes. However for many more experienced web users blogging is also a great content management system, a great search engine optimization tool and an easy way to share information with a targeted audience.

In simplest terms, a blog is a web site that is actually a system of connected pages (or rather posts) that are organized by date with the most recent post presented first. So now that you understand what a blog is we can discuss the definition for blog advertising.

Blog advertising is as simple as it sounds. It is the advertising connected with a blog. Almost since the inception of blogging there has been some form of advertising involved. Banners and text ads have long been run in the top or heading of the blog, along the sides in sidebars, and along the bottom in footers. Then as the text link advertising industry began to pick up bloggers discovered they could sell text links on their blogs. Today, the hot topic in blog advertising is post sponsorship. This means that a blogger will include a link and often targeted key words and text within a post for an advertiser. A sponsored post will sometimes be written specifically for an advertiser and centered around specific key words and phrases. Some sponsored blog posts are reviews of a web site or product. Other sponsored blog posts are straight-forward blog posts that follow the traditional content and format of the blog but give a brief sponsorship mention.

Blogging is certainly not new and blog advertising is not new, but recent developments in the field have made it a hot topic of interest in the internet marketing community.

Learn more about blog advertising and how to advertise on blogs at http://renaissancewomanonline.com/blogadvertising.php

Article directory submission services save writers the agony of submitting to hundreds of article directories by hand, and getting great links in the process.

The automated article directory submission services have their own learning curves though... and for article marketers in the know there are ways to milk thousands of links per submission instead of hundreds. In order to save you the headache often experienced by new article marketers who are just getting to know this article marketing service, here are the top nine tips for submitting your articles with Article Marketer:

1) Be Patient
There is definitely a learning curve for the Article Marketer service. Not so much in adding content into their content management system - that's simple enough. But if you're just getting started with Article Marketer you can expect a healthy number of rejections from their automated checker and then their follow up by-hand editor who does a final check before submission. Be persistent and keep checking back with the service to make sure that your article gets through the editorial gauntlet!

2) Use Multiple Categories
Selecting multiple categories for your article serves a number of benefits. For one thing Article Marketer's shopping your article around to thousands of directories. Not all of these directories have all of the categories listed on Article Marketer. By selecting more than one you're ensuring that you get a wider spread for every article. Further, by selecting three categories for your article you're reducing the amount of rejections you're likely to get. Pick what makes sense though - don't pick completely unrelated categories. Also - considering writing articles for more generic categories such as "free tools and services" and others in order to find maximum distribution.

3) Don't Link in the Body
Article Marketer states that they accept body links to common sites such as CNN, as well as multiple competing sites or multiple complementary sites. Experience shows however that if you're on a tight article marketing time schedule - which you should be - that you're far better off not concerning yourself at all with links in the body. Otherwise you'll probably see your article returned over and over with the same reminder that you should remove commercial links... even if there are no commercial links in your article.

4) Provide Useful Information
It goes - almost - without saying that you should be writing useful articles that will make your readers' lives easier. Obviously you're writing from a self-interest perspective but remember that your potential publishers have their readers' self interests in mind as well. Create resource articles that you think you would have found useful when you first began researching the topic of interest.

5) Don't Use "the sideways V" as Bullets
Article Marketer doesn't like what are commonly referred to as "carrots," which look like sideways "V"s. Since this article will be distributed with Article Marketer all of these carrots are removed. If you're going to do bullets with Article Marketer then you should use the "-" sign, or even a double "::" which looks nice too. There's very little html formatting permissible in Article Marketer so you should get comfortable with text only methods for indicating and emphasizing different sections in your article.

6) Compose in Text Pad So All Characters Publish
Often times word processing programs like Word or others create certain versions of certain characters that are unrecognizable by Article Marketer. Characters like the quotation mark, the ampersand and others will be corrupted by fancy-schmancy word processors so stick to the reliable text editor of your choice that will give you the bare bones of word processing and won't let you write yourself into non-distributable articles.

7) Don't Use Excessive Short Paragraphs
If you write for the web you've probably trained yourself to write shorter, punchier paragraphs. Perhaps even multiple paragraphs that are one sentence long. These types of paragraphs are likely to set off the "carriage return" filter that Article Marketer uses to keep article formatting within acceptable limits. Do yourself a favor and retrain yourself for longer paragraphs - at least for the sake of Article Marketer. At the same time, don't over do it. Keep your paragraphs to around 3-4 sentences each.

8) Excessive Capitalization
If you like to SHOUT SOMETIMES by using all capitals in your writing then you may have to work towards a different method for emphasizing your words. Break out of your all-caps habit and you'll find it much easier to get your articles through the Article Marketer system.

9) 2-3 Links In Your Author Bio
Not only should your author bio be a call to action that includes your website url spelled out with the http://www portion of your web address, but it should include two to three actual hyperlinks to your site or sites. Don't go overboard here, but at the same time, don't short change yourself. And be sure to include both the non-html and the html version of your author bio, and spell out your url completely in both of them.

Thom Kingsley took the 30 Day Article Marketing Challenge and set about to maximize links, traffic and profits through article marketing in just 30 days time. Read article marketing tips on his blog, http://www.MyArticleProject.com

We all love romance, And sex. And yet, these things can become so complicated and entangled that we end up hating ourselves for wanting them so much. Everybody has felt totally overwhelmed by romantic relationships at some points in their lives, starting with the first high school crush. But to my mind, the feeling of being lost in a world of mismatched traffic signs is even more difficult when you are gay. There is simply no reliable roadmap to follow.

First of all, what are our roles? Straight people know what the rules are, how the role playing is supposed to work out. Just watch all the dating games on TV and you will see how finely tuned males and females are to the code words and body language of their culture. The people on those shows have been chosen precisely because they have internalized all of the most banal and stereotypical behaviors and have raised them to a fine art. Now what about gay men and lesbians? Have we ever really figured out what our codes and body language mean? In the world that we have created, based on otherness in a straight culture, much of the allure of a relationship is the ambiguity. I think we avoid any clear explanations because we are afraid that all the magic will simply vanish in the light. We have gotten used to feeling our way in the dark. The gay dating shows I have seen on TV have been failures precisely because of everyones reluctance or inability to communicate what the real attractions were.

Its not that we gay people dont also have our stereotypes raised to a fine art. No way, in fact, we invented that camp game! We create our types by twisting and reworking the raw material that straight people have left us. Shes a gigolo, a female friend says, for instance, describing an ex-girlfriend, like one of those guys in a movie from the 1960s with a girl in every bar. She uses a male reference without the slightest hesitation. But is the woman in question really like one of those guys? I dont think its so simple. Gay people may take on the characteristics of the opposite sex in their romantic relationships, but we pick and choose, mix and match according to some complicated plan even we cannot fully explain.

Shes not really a gigolo, because she is still a woman, and that means she has learned to use certain behaviors to get what she wants in life that are different from the behaviors that men use. She has seen life from a womans perspective, she has learned how to handle the restrictions and exploit the privileges that are a womans lot, no matter what her sexual orientation. She is not a gigolo, and yet it is somehow stimulating, and sexy for other women to see her that way. Its a deception that makes sense to these other women because subconsciously they are also aware of the feminine side of that person and how that side informs her gigolo-ness.

The same can be said for gay men. There are no real queens among men, though there may be legions of people with penises who think that they are Paris Hilton or Ivana Trump. They can never understand what a womans world looks like when you have been female since the day you were born, and they would never renounce the privileges of masculinity that they have enjoyed all their lives. It is precisely those male privileges that empower them to break the gender rules and play the lah de dah femme fatale game.

So what good are these stereotypes, then? Can they help us find ourselves, the way that Tiffany-and-Brad on the Dating Game can help straight teenagers learn the ropes? The great majority of gay people, I believe, strive for some kind of harmony in their personal lives that manages to see with both male and female vision in a rich and rewarding way. The problem is, we dont know how to interpret what we are seeing. It is hard enough for people with the monovision of one sex, but for us it is doubly confusing. Who can guide us? Ironically, we need these people at the extremes, we need them to search out the far frontiers of gender bending and to report back what they find. Otherwise, those of us in the middle will have to muddle along forever, blindly mixing our own instincts with the dubious words of wisdom of Tiffany and Brad. Not a pleasant thought.

Dominic Ambrose is a writer and script developer for an independent film company in Paris. Take a look at his writings on http://www.dominicambrose.com and his new entertainment blog at http://www.dominicambrose.com/blog/