In the past month and a half, people everywhere took this idea of things certain types of people say and started creating their own videos. Some are based in observation, some from personal experience; some are in the name of awareness which lends to social justice activism (most notably, this happened with the Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls video), and some are merely a few minutes of someone indulging in poking a little fun at themselves and those who can relate to them. Late last week, I found one that sums up what I do here on Woman Tribune pretty accurately–Sh*t Mom Bloggers Say.

I have watched this video several times and I feel very confident in saying that it is impossible that it will get old any time soon. I also sent it to my partner who was very quick to point out some of the hilarious things he has seen me do in the name of blogging. Another great thing about this video is that it introduced me to Mama Knows It All. I began reading her blog very shortly after finding her video and as it turns out, she is pretty awesome, so you should definitely check her out–after you finish watching the video and laughing your ass off.

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How I wish social media was then what it is today. We were lucky to at least have Instant Messenger.

According to ComScore 2010 US Digital Year in Review women spend more time social networking than men. Women spent approximately 16.8% on social sites in December of 2010 while men spent only 12%.

Today, social media tools are just as much associated with businesses as well as personal lives. Some researchers claim women are better with social media while others say men are. To confuse matters further, the LinkedIn research team suggests that women are better communicators in male industries and men are better at marketing in female industries (here is the report).

However, is this a real gender issue–or is it more about the skills needed to get the job done?

In this article, I address specific skills which are necessary to have in order to effectively and efficiently work with these tools. A few are listed below.

Communication and Relationships

To be fair, men can be great communicators in the work place where they are required to communicate information related to their expertise. My brother is a perfect example. He is a doctor and is known for his warm old fashioned bedside manner with his patients. He is patient, takes his time explaining technical diagnoses in simple-to-understand terms. His patients love him. However, as his sister, I find his personal communication skills stink (for lack of a better word) and could use drastic improvement.

On the other hand, women stereotypically speaking are natural communicators. We innately desire more emotional components in our relationships, from the personal sexual aspect to the professional relationships we build in the workplace.

Having worked for nearly a decade from a home office, transitioning to a new job in an office location with other women was something I wasn’t too crazy about at first as I’m quite content minding my own when I work. However, it wasn’t before long I started finding the need to get up out of my chair just to see what was going on with others and start a little friendly chit chat.

While working at home, I had my husband to chat with throughout the day or at lunch. In the office in my new job at the time, I still needed that interactivity–I never knew how innate it actually was in my own life.

Organization and Strategy

Another skill a person who wants to be successful at social marketing must have is the ability to be strategically organized. This means planning campaigns and following through. My husband is a big picture thinker and visionary. He comes up with an idea and yet doesn’t have a clue how to strategically implement it. Just throw it out there and see what happens.

Yes, I know some women are like this too, but I’m talking in general–and yes based on stereotypes. In my current job, I just wrote a press release about our sip solutions for encryption. Sip service or trunking is another term for VoIP, but for business. I created a list of all the places I would need to post a link or reference to this press release. No point in posting it online at our website only to not tell anyone about it–what a waste of time! So, I organized a list of all the places and how to spread the word. I also wrote a blog post on the topic, creating additional internal linking and relevant content.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, website, blogs, and newsletters–all these had to be strategically worded and sent out. I had to figure out not only what day to send it out, but what time of day in order to be most effective. Even though my male boss said it was fine to send it out on the weekend, I knew I’d be better off waiting for Monday daytime at the earliest. My efforts proved right.

To do well at social media is not about sending tweets at 2AM announcing a random new promo. It’s much more than that. It’s engaging with your audience in a deliberate and well managed and thought out process.

Intuition–Women Tend to Be Better at It

When dealing with social media, the tone of communication used for one company may be different than another. Learning to discern what is appropriate is an important aspect of communicating–it calls for intuition, something women tend to have a knack for.

For example, when working with my husband’s small business in sales, I knew many of our customers were from the art industry and not Corporate America. Many in our industry were mom and pop stores and having a personal touch is what worked for them.

Today, I work with a corporation, where my interactions may not be as personal–but the level of communication skill is–as long as it’s in an appropriate manner. For example, my role may be to ask a lot of industry specific questions to instigate a stronger degree of interaction and debate by those in my circles.

In the end, when dealing with social media tools, does it really matter if the role belongs to a man or woman? My answer is no, as long as the candidate has the proper interpersonal and relational skills needed for that particular job and industry. If they don’t, are they able to adapt and change?

Organization, strategy, intuition, and the ability to communicate effectively with the target audience–these are the skills which an individual who wants to be successful in the social media marketing world must either already possess or show an ability to learn an attain. If they cannot listen, learn and be trained–find someone who can!

Photo by Internet Marketing1

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After seeing a post on Dr. Patch Adams’ website, Bloggers Unite were inspired to create a day in his honor centered around this very trait that Dr. Adams so abundantly lives his life by. In the post, Dr. Adams put together a variety of different ways to show compassion in your everyday life. The list was designed to be part of a medical school program, but on May 15th, Bloggers Unite is asking bloggers all over the world to join them in celebrating Dr. Patch Adams and the act of compassion by picking one or two ideas out of this list and incorporating them into your blogging.

How would these ideas change you as a person, and how would that change impact your loved ones and their loved ones?

Take a moment, think about it and share your story with the world on May 15th for International Day of Compassion in Honor of Dr. Patch Adams.

“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business. It is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability. It is essential for human survival.”
–Dalai Lama

• Keep a journal about your relationship with love and compassion. What is it? Ask everyday, how are you giving it? (Pay close attention. Be present.) How are you receive it? (From everything, from strangers, from trees, etc.)

• Do things outrageous for love, like clowning.

• Actually see if you can produce the vibration of compassion for prolonged periods. What sustains it? (Friends, having meaning, fun.) What hurts it? (Arrogance, apathy, tight underwear.) Are there times you do not want to be compassionate?

• Be observant of compassion in action around you, everywhere, and give details of its language.

• Become aware of compassionate projects around the world and plan on at least one elective at a project.

• Explore the language of love and compassion. Read psychologists and poets, write essays on things you love.

• How do you recognize love and compassion? Are there measurements?

• How do you change performances of compassion in different situations?

• Explore how you relate to other people on issues of class consciousness, race, age, sexual preference. Pay close attention. Decide to connect with people you don’t normally hang out with.

• Explore this question: Should a medical student be evaluated for compassion and not graduate if they are not compassionate? How is it evaluated? By who?

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So you would think that with a resume like mine, I would have had all the kinks of Woman Tribune’s design worked out long ago. You would have thought right, that is, until I changed the way in which the images of each blog post appeared on our main page and then didn’t re-check the way in which other browsers dealt with this seemingly small change. Big mistake.

Early last week, while talking to a friend of mine and finishing up a website I had created for a client (and Woman Tribune contributor), we got to talking about browsers; specifically Internet Explorer and how the browser has very much succeeded in becoming the thorn in the side of just about every web designer and developer out there. This point was driven home right after I decided to bring up Woman Tribune in IE since I haven’t checked the site out in that particular browser since it first launched after being completely revamped and re-branded months ago. Turns out that IE has not been showing the images of each blog post on our main page at all and I have been sitting here, blissfully ignorant of the issue. Yeah.

So you may have noticed that Woman Tribune went a few days without being updated last week. If you visit the site itself frequently, you will also have noticed that when we did start updating again, Woman Tribune was looking a bit different. It was through that conversation and finding out that IE has been having some problems with one teeny, tiny line of code, that I decided Woman Tribune absolutely, positively needed to be redesigned. Sure, I could have just fixed one part of the code, but as I tweeted in the midst of redesigning the site, I make web design mountains out of molehills.

And so here you have it, the new design of Woman Tribune. The last design I will roll out within the foreseeable future because really, I’m not so much into change or feeling the need to look at something completely different every few months, although I very much used to be that way. I would spend more time designing a website than actually updating it. I’m over that now so I hope you all really love the new look because I do, and hey, if you don’t, there’s always the RSS feed!

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Oh my goodness, it’s Ultimate Blog Party time again! Every year I swear I have a complete mental lapse and completely forget about this amazing event, but like clockwork, my very good friend Jenny reminds me. She’s pretty amazing like that, and she’s also partying so go check her out!

So, if all of this Ultimate Blog Party talk is completely new to you, let me get you up to speed. Every year, the immensely awesome women over at 5 Minutes for Mom put together the Ultimate Blog Party, a blogging event where all sorts of bloggers–thousands of bloggers, in fact– take part by creating a party post, pretty much like the one you are reading right now, and do a whole lot of blog hopping. Laughs are shared, discussions begin, and friendships are formed. It’s a really incredible way of meeting new bloggers and making new friends. I’m a big fan, which is probably why I have been participating in the Ultimate Blog Party since 2008!

So hello there, newcomers! Welcome to Woman Tribune!

My name is Holly and I’m a 24-year-old woman who has dreamed of being a writer since I was in the eighth grade. After dropping out of high school as a senior (because I was an angst-ridden teenager who had just been diagnosed with severe clinical depression that I still live with today), I got my GED less than a year later. With no college degree or any other certification assuring newspapers, magazines, or corporate-owned blogs that I was worthy of being a writer, I created Woman Tribune in January 2008. So I guess you could call me a professional blogger, since I do make my living through blogging, but “professional blogger”, to me, sounds way too cool and professional. Instead, I prefer to be known as simply a woman with a penchant for typing while in pajamas and drinking coffee until the wee hours of the morning. That’s just more me.

Woman Tribune is based off of a very simple concept. It is a blog that regularly features news and information from around the world on just about everything. It’s pretty general and wide open because I really hate the idea of being stifled and enjoy the freedom to write about whatever I find interesting, exciting, or informative. Simply put, it’s a blog that explores everything within our collective lives, regardless of where we happen to be in our life’s journey.

I live in a very small town in Northeast, Pennsylvania, made up of only about 600 people. It’s the almost-country. I live on a street that brings you directly into another small town, but if you take a wrong turn, you’re likely to get lost within the many, many acres of farms.

I live with my partner, Allen, who I refuse to call my boyfriend because it makes me feel like I’m still in Junior High. We have been together for a little over five years. Here’s a picture of us taken last Christmas. Mind you, it is not a particularly great picture, but it’s a picture!

We also have two cats; Devin, who is about four years old and Vincent who is almost a year. If I didn’t have Allen, I would definitely be considered one of those oh, so very cliche “crazy cat ladies.” Then again, I do probably fit the bill.

Woman Tribune isn’t my whole life, just most of it! In addition to pouring myself into this website daily, I also blog on Menstrual Poetry, a blog that can only be described as “the personal is political”. You see, a lot of people think I’m a controversial person, although I really don’t. I think I’m a swell–and often hilarious–person who just so happens to be a feminist. My grandmother sums up everything I do in life, from my decision to work from home to the fact that I am adamantly against using a blow dryer on my hair on the fact that I’m a feminist. Whenever she introduces me to people or I am talking to anyone she knows, she feels the need to immediately interject with ‘…and she’s a feminist!’ as if it is a warning to anyone who comes into contact with me. Kind of like ‘…and she has leprosy! So don’t get too close!’

Also, all those things you’re not really supposed to talk about at parties; things like politics and most social issues… Yeah, I’m not too good about keeping those thoughts to myself, especially at parties and that goes double for family dinners. But I’m also an incredibly open-minded person who really just loves talking about things that you’re not supposed to. That also goes for menstruation. I could talk about it all day long with a side of extra spicy hot wings.

I am also a sporadic web designer and developer. I am completely self-taught and started learning HTML code when I was 12 years old. My dad used to think I wasted all my time on the computer doing nothing. It is because of those years that I can now waste all my time on the computer doing something!

Thanks for visiting my party post and I hope you take a look around Woman Tribune while you’re here! Hopefully I didn’t go on too long and bore you out of your mind or drive you away!

If you’re still with me here, you should go enter a giveaway we have going on right now. We are giving away a copy of the newly-released Wow! Wow! Wubbzy Easter DVD, “Wubbzy’s Egg-Cellent Easter”. This giveaway ends April 7th at 11:59 p.m. ET.

I look forward to connecting with everyone at the Ultimate Blog Party this year! Have fun!

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The new Woman Tribune is also a lot more straight-forward than the old Woman Tribune site. The magazine-style content has been replaced by your standard list of recent posts. Our content is still truncated, as to not completely overwhelm people with so much content of varying categories, while also allowing you all to quickly scan our latest posts–and hopefully find a few things that interest you. After a few people brought it to my attention that they didn’t know exactly what to do as soon as they arrive on-scene here because there were so many different articles scattered throughout the site, despite my best intentions to separate the categories and topics we cover here, I knew I had to change things up a bit and that trail of thought led straight to “Not only should I change how our content is displayed, but how everything is displayed should change! Everything should be new and awesome and better!” Hopefully I have succeeded in my intention to make this site a little more straight-forward, a little cleaner and a lot more awesome.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not shamelessly plug another endeavor of mine. If you like the new look of Woman Tribune and need a website of any kind designed, or even if you just need some kick ass graphics, my partner and I recently launched a small, two-person web design and development firm, Living Absence. Hit us up if you’re in need of some awesome website goodness.

I have tested this site and its function to the best of my preliminary knowledge, but if you have any problems viewing the new site in any way, please let me know either in the comments or you can email me directly at holly@womantribune.com and I’ll do my best to figure out what’s going on. I’d surely appreciate your input!

Another thing I have been giving a lot of thought to is how I share my personal perspective and viewpoints in the content I write here. As anyone who quickly scans this site can immediately sense is that this is not your standard blog; it is more of a web magazine or more vaguely described as merely a web space for women. We cover a lot of topics within a good amount of categories and not every article really needs an elaborate back story or personal tangent and while I am prone to go off on tangents here and there, I was reminded after watching a video blog from Jenn who was talking about the kinds of panels and events that were at at the Type-A Mom conference that dealt with very little else besides how to make your blog a business, of just how easy it is to produce content without adding much, or even any, personal flare to what is being put out there. And by “out there” I mean on here, on this website, and what is made visible to you, the person reading this site. Being too impersonal is not good and not something I thought would happen with me, the woman who has been a resident of the blogosphere for over 10 years. While I primarily focus on my personal views of things like politics, social issues, sexuality, media, and so forth on my personal-ish blog, when it comes to Woman Tribune, I’d like to be just a touch more personal when the mood is right and the content is relevant. So expect more of a personal perspective from me, Holly, the woman behind Woman Tribune, and what my life entails besides the working, responding to emails, doing web design and development and other techy-related stuff that makes up my day.

Lastly, if you haven’t done so yet, you should enter our $100 AMEX gift card giveaway. The giveaway ends tonight, Thursday, November 4th at 11:59PM EST. You still have some time left, so get on that!

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The Ultimate Blog Party 2010 has officially begun! Towards the end of March Jenny posted about the annual blogging event going on at 5 Minutes for Mom and since then, I have been completely stoked for it, having participated the last two years, each time being amazed at the wonderful women I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and the new blogs I was introduced to and still read today. Finally, the time is here and I can’t wait to meet even more wonderful ladies!

So I suppose I should tell you a little about myself…

My name is Holly and I created this here website. Woman Tribune is more of a women’s magazine than your average blog. We try to post on a variety of different topics and issues that are important to women today, from the serious, like parenting, green living and ways people and organizations are changing the world, to the completely frivolous and fun entertainment industry. No one has just one interest, which was the exact concept behind the creation of this blog, being a woman of many interests myself, and also a woman who wears many different hats. While you’ll find a lot of news oriented things here, I’m always sure to add a personal touch to what I write and you’ll also be sure to find a lot of things about my day-to-day life and my family as well.

I’m 23 years old and I’m a full-time, professional blogger both here, as well as on a feminist/political website, Menstrual Poetry. When I’m not blogging, I do freelance writing, web design and development. Needless to say, I spend most of my time in front of a computer. I live with my partner of nearly 5 years, Allen, and our cat, Devin.

Yes, that is my obscenely over-crowded desk and Devin acting like she owns the place.

While we don’t have any children of our own, I get to share his two little girls from his previous marriage. Their names are Lydian, who is five and Rylie, who is four. They provide constant joy, laughter, challenges and have a tendency to consistently get me to question my own sanity. Fortunately, I happen to have a database of Disney Princess trivia stored in my head, which gives me unlimited brownie points with Rylie.

I’m really excited to be participating in this year’s Ultimate Blog Party and I also happen to have a really great giveaway going on; well, at least I think it’s pretty great! Oddly enough, coinciding my giveaways with the party was not planned, it just happened to (thankfully) work out that way.

We are giving away 10 copies of the new edition of My Little Red Book, an anthology of short stories from women of all ages, from all around the world about first periods. To win, all you have to do is leave a comment on the giveaway post telling us about your first period. Don’t worry, we’re not asking for graphic details! This giveaway ends April 14th, so go enter!

Lastly, you can follow Woman Tribune on Twitter @WomanTribune and become a fan of Woman Tribune on Facebook–if you like Woman Tribune, that is! Otherwise you don’t have to and I won’t be mad or anything!

That’s it for me! I hope you enjoyed your time here on Woman Tribune and got a feel for what I’m all about. I love meeting new, fellow bloggers and I can’t wait to meet all of the wonderful ladies participating in the Ultimate Blog Party. Happy blog hopping!

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Every year for the past couple of years, the ladies over at 5MFM hold the Ultimate Blog Party. It’s an annual event where you can visit a shit’ton of bloggers and people, win prizes and make some new friends in the process. I’ve personally made some new friends in the 2 years I’ve participated in the party and gotten some new regular readers to my blog as well. But the awesome part is *leansinclose*, you don’t have to be a parent or a blogger to join either. Non-parents and non-bloggers are welcome to party as well.

If you wanna find out more about it, just check out their post here. I hope you do join. You’ll love it and you get so much out of it.

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The blogosphere is made up of countless blogs on an exuberant amount of different topics. There is literally about 500 different blogs that appeal to every one person. That is how big the blogosphere is. While there are so, so many different things people bring up, explore, dissect and discuss on their blogs, when you cut through all the clever wording used to describe what a particular blog is all about what type of content you would expect to find there, there are mainly two different types of blogs–those used to detail, rant and rave about one’s life and blogs built and written by and for corporations. As more and more people start opening up and divulging just about everything that goes through their heads to their prospective audiences and as more corporations seek to identify and connect with their consumers, the line between these two, seemingly separate blog types continues to blur where we, the blog readers, see our favorite blogs writing about and being sponsored by corporations. Before the most recent FTC guidelines have been put into place, most of the time, blog readers did not know when we, bloggers, were just sharing information or were being compensated in some way for what we wrote about products and businesses.

As this already very thin line continues to blur, people who began blogging to divulge, rant, rave and detail their lives on the internet are evolving their blogs into their businesses and in some, albeit rare cases, a person’s blog makes up their entire of the bulk of their household income. While most people put the emphasis of being compensated for blog posts, advertisements and the like on mommybloggers, this trend has and will continue amongst any and all blogs with a significant audience that is deemed a “target audience” by consumers.

Woman Tribune started out as a business-like blog. It was not created merely to divulge about my life, although I have done just that on several occasions and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as Woman Tribune is up and running, but it was created more-so to provide information and to explore and discuss information that is important and significant in the lives of women everywhere. To put it bluntly, Woman Tribune was created as a business, rather than something fun to do in my down time and because of that, Woman Tribune has always operated with a business-like platform. One of the major things to keep in mind when creating a blog with the purpose of it being a business in mind is that it must always contain recent information. While I do my best to post about relevant, interesting and varied topics, if I let Woman Tribune sit for a few days with no content going up after a number of days, it is pretty much the equivalent of committing blogosphere suicide. It starts to become irrelevant, something easy to gloss over and it becomes forgettable. So obviously, knowing that not only is content king in the blogging world, but frequent content is also king and something that must be kept in mind to sustain your blogging/business, the thought of blogging schedules is guaranteed to come up in your mind at least, oh, about 150 times. A day.

Blogging schedules are tricky. Every “professional blogger” or “internet/blog marketer, “interblog marketer” if you will, repeatedly states in just about every five posts for about five years straight to post on your blog as many times as you’d like, but around the same time every day in order to set your readers on a schedule and give them something to look forward to. This is all well and good, in theory, but can become quite a mess in no time and without any effort.

Firstly, trying to get my readers on some sort of “schedule” of when to expect my new posts seems a little weird to me. A little like parenting and why would I start treating my readers like my children when most of them already have children of their own? To add to this, because most of my readers do have children of their own, that means that while they probably love, and even fantasize, about the thought of having some semblance of a schedule, in reality, that is really not given to most parents. Adding to that, for a blogger to be available at around the same, exact time every day in order to update their blog makes it sound like they are lacking a life, which then again may be why they make the money and can be considered interblog marketers in the first place. Just sayin’…

I have always been a night owl; there is just something about the dark and the quiet that really jump-starts my mojo and really puts me to work. I tip a significant hat to the night time as being a key factor in my web design/development talents and for putting my natural knack for the English language to work as a writer early. I have been on the internet, designing and developing websites, writing (mostly) bad poetry and blogging since I was 13 years old. That is an entire decade of this stuff and for the longest time, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and I built a name for myself in the political and feminist blogging worlds early. I thought I had some sort of an idea of what I was doing, but as I founded Woman Tribune and found myself enthralled with this new “blogging business” everyone jumped on the bandwagon of over the course of the past few years, I realized that in order to treat this business like a legitimate business, I was going to have to adapt to some business hours. This is exactly where my blogging schedule goes a bit haywire. Because I am a night owl, I am very often up all night (it’s 5:11am here right now and I have not yet been to bed. You obviously get the picture.) and because of this, I am usually not awake during “business hours,” ie: 9am to 5pm. A lot other bloggers have come out quite frequently to say that they too are night owls or suffer from insomnia and in order to still operate under the disguise, for lack of a better word, of being awake during normal business hours, they simply schedule their blog posts that they have written in advance, to publish throughout the day. I could do this if my WordPress did not consistently refuse to publish scheduled posts, therefore making me believe that my installation of WordPress has developed some sort of technological personality and I am just not ready for my content management system to start taking over my life, and then of course, the world.

Just a few days ago I had stayed up all night and got so, completely tired, but wanted to force myself to stay up all day and “work,” also known as write blog posts which is very much work in my life, this website technically being my business regardless of how much I enjoy doing it, but something dawned on me–something that should have dawned on me quite a while ago. I created Woman Tribune in order to provide information to women and to explore and open discussion about the topics that interest me, and collectively other women around the world. If I stay up all night and sleep all day, yet still provide this same service, then I have essentially fulfilled my obligation. If Woman Tribune has become even the least bit important, or a daily stop on women’s blog hopping and internet stays throughout the day, then it technically should not matter when new posts hit the home page.

When small potatoes bloggers, and yes I do very much consider myself small potatoes, I do not have an ego in the least when it comes to my “online personality,” see the blogs of corporations or really, really big potatoes bloggers updating several times a day it is because most of them have a staff of writers. Most of them have pre-written posts to publish throughout the day to make themselves look more professional, again for lack of a better word, than they really are. Bloggers who have created their own websites and who are the sole bloggers on their websites cannot catch up to the amount of volume being presented on professional and corporate-backed blogs and it is about time that we stop trying to. We don’t have teams or staff, we just have ourselves and if people are still logging onto our websites, then it must be enough and it must be okay.

Do you keep to a blogging schedule? Do you think having a blogging schedule or posting at the same time every day is important?

While I and Woman Tribune, essentially is a “small potatoes” blog, I am very interested in its continued expansion and if any women out there are interested in contributing guest posts or weekly/daily columns to Woman Tribune, please feel free to contact me directly at holly[at]womantribune[dot]com to contribute your awesome blogging talents. I’m sure we could work something out and you would be in pretty good company because for the most part, I kick ass. Again, just sayin’…

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After a few searches through WordPress’ plugin directory I found the plugin that finally brought my spam comment hysteria to an end–Simple CAPTCHA!

Captcha image verification has been a staple on blogs small and large alike to cut down on the monstrous amount of spam comments an average blog accumulates. We hadn’t had this implemented on Woman Tribune because we did not have an absolute need for it. Sure, we did accumulate a great deal of spam comments, but it was pretty manageable–until now. So the time has come for CAPTCHA image verification to become a necessity for Woman Tribune and so I downloaded and installed Simple CAPTCHA, a simple and secure plugin that adds a little six letter/number combination field to your already existing comment structure.

As far as simplicity when installing the plugin goes, you cannot get any simpler than Simple CAPTCHA–which is probably why they put the word simple in the title of the plugin! It’s an easy upload process, click activate in your WordPress dashboard and you’re good to go! Yeah, that is it and since installing the plugin, I have not had one of these comments leak through and I did not lose one legitimate comment.

So if you’re looking for an image verification plugin that you do not have to set up at all that will do its job exactly as you want it to, check out Simple CAPTCHA.

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If you haven’t yet seen the Federal Trade Commission’s new 81-page document (or if you don’t have access to someone with the eccentric skill set needed to decipher the language) it basically means that starting December 1, 2009 if you are compensated in any way for a blog post you write (or info you share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other new media outlet,) you must disclose that you have been compensated by the company that provided you either with cash, a free product, or any other type of compensation you received from the company.

If you bought the product or service you are reviewing or sharing your opinion on with your own money, then you are not required to disclose any information whatsoever. If you received a product for free from a company, you are now mandated to write a little blurb on the bottom of your blog post that goes something like ‘I received this product for free from X company and all information in this blog post regarding said product is is the sole opinion of myself and do not represent the thoughts of X company.’ Or you could be a little less-professional, which is what most bloggers will be doing come December 1, and just add a short and sweet ‘I received this product for free from X company.’ The only hole in this legislation is if you did buy a product you decided to review on your blog with your own money and you fall under siege of the FTC, how do you prove that you bought any products you reviewed on your website? How many of you actually keep the receipts of gifts you buy for your children and loved ones or apparel that you absolutely love after wearing and want to share a brand with your readers? No, in most cases you don’t and how else would you prove that you did buy a product that appeared on your site that could cost you up to $11,000 per post if you don’t disclose any business relationship.

However, semantics really does play a part in this conversation and not just because I am a blogger who is really not very happy with the new FTC mandates. For instance, Woman Tribune currently has a site-wide disclosure in place that distinctly states that I receive forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. Granted, it also states that you, my readers, do not know which posts are sponsored by any company in most cases, but the policy of Woman Tribune that I am adamant about because it is my own, personal and ethical belief, is that whether or not a post is sponsored by a company, service, website, and so on, my blog posts are always honest and if I don’t like a product or service that I was asked if I would try, or I find anything misleading about a sponsor, I won’t think twice about reporting my findings; note the ‘ethical blogger’ badge in the footer of Woman Tribune. As far as I’ve seen, most bloggers who accept sponsorship of any kind feel the same, exact way.

I think the media, especially when targeting “mommy bloggers” who blog for profit or are often sponsored by companies or services, have blown blogging sponsorship way out of proportion and have basically represented women bloggers, who make up most bloggers who review products and are sponsored in any way by any company as people who sell their souls for freebies, which is completely not the case and is probably why the FTC felt the pressure to amend their legislation and place mandates on bloggers.

The FTC’s new mandates on bloggers are only subject to US bloggers, so those who live outside of the US who don’t have strict mandates over media or any other niche that free-thinkers and free-speakers thrive in, do not have anything to worry about. If you’re a blogger whose web host is located outside of the US I don’t believe should be subject to the new mandate, although I’m not a lawyer or a member of the FTC, so I could be mistakes and it’s always wise to double check. The bottom line is that bloggers who are endorsed by any company, service, etc. and whodo not disclose the relationship they have with the company are subject to fines equaling up to $11,000 per post.

Are you a blogger who feels under siege by the FTC? What are your thoughts on the new blogger mandates?

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The author of this article stated that if a directory linked sites in this way…

http://www.yourlisting.com/click.php?linkname

instead of listing them this way…

http://www.yourdomain.com

that you should move on to the next. I can see the logic in this, I really can. It’s all about the link back, right? People are greedy for them, and they want good PR (even though Google won’t give more than three from what I’ve seen). Personally, I don’t care which way they do it. I’ll confess, my listings link sites in the /click.php?linkname manner, but that’s how the script creator wrote it. That’s not my fault, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, back to the rant…

So if they’re saying this to people looking for places to list their sites, then what about the top 100′s that people add their sites to that link site(s) in this way…

http://www.yourtoplistsite.com/out.php?id=101

There’s no link juice coming out of that, and people seem to be fine with it. I think people are too worried about PR and link popularity instead of who is seeing their links to begin with. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter how a directory or listing displays your link(s). Add them anyway. At least then you won’t be missing out on all that potential traffic.

What’s your opinion? Do you care? Do you have a preference? Share with us

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Aside from my idea of offering free WordPress themes, I found groups where you post your FaceBook Network Blogs url, groups where you post your Twitter profile and get followed by other people, and groups where you can get your posts voted up on social media sites (omg more of those please!). Even the idea of when people post contests and giveaways, they list following them in some way or another as a way to enter. We’ve all seen those, I’m sure. Now, that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, unless your a high profile blogger with a well set group of roadies, you got nothing really. Just a lot of clutter in your profiles.

You know what I noticed? And I don’t know if this has happened to others. I’ve run two giveaways on this blog, one of them being unsuccessful which sucks cause it was awesome. People subscribed, followed, commented as they were told to do to enter. But when the deal was done and the giveaway was over, I started getting emails saying this person unsubscribed from my feed and/or that person unfollowed me on Twitter. I don’t think I’m the only one this is happening to, but what was the point in asking them to do so if they were gonna undo it later? It kind of defeats the purpose and it makes my site (and me) sad that people don’t think I’m worth keeping up with. They’re probably right, but still!!

So, in conclusion, unless your already popular and have been around for a while and are known, I don’t think it’s worth trying to get up to your eyeballs into all of this social business. Granted, it takes time to build readership, but personally, I don’t think it’s working out for myself (being the comment whore I am) and a lot of other people I’ve seen having the same issues. I’m not saying I’m giving up though. ‘Cause I’m not! I shall own the internet one day, you watch. And I’ll be the super networker everyone wishes they were. Mwahahaha!!

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The FREE Basic Website consist of a 3 to 5 page design, basic header image, and an email contact form to be included on a page (if so desired). The contest winner may pay to upgrade services or may purchase additional services to go along with the contest prize.

Leave us your comments. Click here and let us know why you would like a new website design!  Be sure to subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter to be automatically entered in all giveaways at Chic Galleria. Ends April 16th midnight EST.

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But the way you market your blog and yourself “in real life” does not stop merely at business cards. A great scenario is when you host an in-house event or party for fellow bloggers in your areas. While you will most definitely be exchanging business cards during your event, it is the little things that make a big difference in any social or business exchange. A few days after your event, you could send the people who attended personalized postcards with your blog’s logo on them, thanking them for attending. It’s also a great idea to have your blog’s address as well as your contact information printed on the postcard just in case your business card was lost or damaged. This subtle but important touch lets your attendees know that you are thankful for their time and attention and you appreciated the time they took to attend your event and that you enjoyed being able to communicate with them on a face-to-face basis.

Don’t let your creativity be stifled in this process; VistaPrint is a great company that allows you to have the creative freedom you need to create promotional and business items for yourself, your brand, and your blog at an affordable price without any limitations, so you have the peace of mind, knowing exactly how your items will look when they arrive at your door.

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I had no idea that it was already Ultimate Blog Party time, but while blog hopping through my favorite blogs and commenting (something I haven’t been doing very often due to various time constraints that all have to do with how much time my job has been taking away from me and my real life of blogging) I started seeing various party posts and of course, immediately got excited and went on over to 5 Minutes for Mom to pick up my badge and get the party started here.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, the 5 Minutes for Mom Ultimate Blog Party is the event of the year for women bloggers. It is the best event to take part in to get your blog noticed and to discover blogs that I guarantee you will be reading for some time after the party has ended. Woman Tribune participated last year and we found some great finds and had a blast meeting so many other women bloggers. There were over 1500 participants last year and the blog party is growing every year. But blog promotion isn’t the only thing in participating in the blog party for you–There are also prizes. Lots of prizes.

A Little About Me:

I’m Holly, I am a 22-year-old web designer, freelance writer, and obsessive blogger. I live in a very small, desolate town in Pennsylvania with my boyfriend (who has 2 young children from a previous marriage) and our cat.

In addition to creating Woman Tribune, I also created Menstrual Poetry, a feminist/political website, and I also write short films about social issues that are plaguing the lives of women and girls world-wide that not many people like to or are willing to initiate conversation about. I am the definition of a workaholic. I am always working on something, whether it be for a my job or for my own projects and while most of my awake hours are spent in front of a computer, I love what I do.

A Giveaway for You

As a treat to the Ultimate Blog Party party hoppers, we are running our first giveaway ever! We are giving away a freshwater pearl bracelet to 3 lucky winners as part of Cheerios partnering with WomenHeart to promote women’s heart health.

To win the freshwater pearl bracelet go to our giveaway post and leave a comment about what you do to maintain a healthy heart. There are also options for how you can get additional entries. Check it out!

I have my eye on a few Ultimate Blog Party prizes; well more than a few, actually:

At the top of my list is #87–Six piece Insider’s Beauty Collection via Call When You Get There, #55–Strawberry Smash Moisturizer from Farmhouse Fresh via Now What Baby, #20–handmade goat milk soap from Goat Milk Stuff, #14–products from Scentsy

But would be more than happy to receive #83–$25 gift certificate to Ecostore USA via Sweet Serendipity, USC 9–$50 gift certificate to Salon Hive, USC 48–Choice of women’s hat from Jaybird Designs

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Based on creativity, clean designs, user friendliness, layout structure and organization, Balkhis has named Woman Tribune one of the 50 best looking blog designs of 2008.

We could not be more ecstatic about this, it has definitely been a fun, exciting and most of all, worthwhile journey to get where we are today.

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Whether you started your blog for personal use or to market your business, it is wise to think about your website as an additional relationship with a partner who is insanely jealous. It will need tender loving care, especially during the first three to four months and if you even think of giving something else your attention, even for a little while, your blog is going to be very upset with you, sitting there with no one paying attention to it.

With the amount of time you will spend writing your posts, advertising them as well as your blog as a whole, your blog will definitely take up a great deal of your time. If you started a blog to make money, give up your dream of making a living from blogging because it will firstly take a great deal of time to build your blog and start attracting loyal readers. While there are very few bloggers who can afford to quit their jobs and live freely collecting income from their blogs, such as Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, he tends to give people the illusion that it is easy if they just read his blog and follow what he teaches you. Even if you have been reading and following the advice Darren has given since ProBlogger’s conception, you may still be sitting there with a pagerank 0 blog (especially if you started doing paid posts or selling direct advertising on your blog, Google tends to hate when people start making money from their blogs) and an Alexa rank up in the millions. There is no such thing as overnight success in the blogging world and even if you worked diligently for months, or even years, your blog still may not go anywhere and that is a reality that all bloggers looking for some sort of payoff face and agree to when starting their blogs.

Although it seems like everyone already has a blog, it isn’t as easy as people elude to. Reading internet marketing blogs, taking professional blogger’s advice and buying books giving you the illusion that it is easy to earn a six-figure income from blogging alone isn’t going to work overnight and in some cases, not at all. Most importantly, you must remember the key points to blogging–You must have patience, don’t be afraid to spend time on it even if you’re not seeing any money from it and most importantly, love what you do because that is the only way you’re going to be able to spend so much time on something without any sort of payoff besides the sense of pride you have in yourself every time you hit ‘publish.’

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As soon as you go to log in to your WordPress admin panel after downloading 2.7 “Coltrane” named after John Coltrane, you will immediately notice the changes–and they don’t stop there. The entire WordPress dashboard has not only been changed, but if you don’t like it, you now have the power to move everything around to fit your most comfortable specifications. According to WordPress, version 2.7 is the product of the continuous feedback received by the community of people running WordPress on their websites. “Coltrane” aims to not only be sleek and pretty, which it completely nails on the head, but also faster–Every single thing you do in WordPress to manage your website should now take fewer clicks to accomplish speeding up the blogging process.

If you have been on the fence about upgrading to WordPress 2.7 due to being comfortable with the old interface or want to know more about how version 2.7 will work, check out this awesome video by WordPress taking you through the entire interface top to bottom and officially introducing you to “Coltrane.”

Have you been blogging with version 2.7? Upgraded and run into a few conflicting kinks with your design or the way your blog works? Does Coltrane satisfy your needs as far as a reliable, dynamic blogging platform? Whatever your thoughts and experiences are, leave them in the comments!

If you don’t currently blog with WordPress but have been interested in trying it out, I highly recommend it, it is what I use on all of my websites (including this one!) and you can download it right here.

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Most people who run a blog are interested in monetizing it, and for good reason. Why shouldn’t people who pour countless hours into keeping their blog fresh and exciting get compensated for their hard work? To date, people are compensated for that work through advertising, sponsorships and even tip jars, but what YouData noticed is that while your attention is being bought all the time, it isn’t being bought from you.

YouData matches people with ads for websites they’re actually genuinely interested in through their MeFile profile. If you’re sick of being shown ads for websites, businesses and products you’re not interested in, like if you can’t book and suddenly see a website littered with foodie ads, or if you’re married or in an otherwise committed relationship and see a bunch of ads for Match.com, chances are you don’t care and you’re not going to click on that ad.

What I like about YouData is that it is extremely versatile. You are matched up with ads that chances are, you’re going to like, and you can view these ads on the YouData website, your favorite websites who have the YouData widget on their website, or even on your desktop so you can view your ads without even having to open your browser.

If you are interested in other ways you can monetize your blog, give people the option of checking their ads on your website. To get a YouData application code for your website, all you have to do is sign up here or email mailto:monetize@youdata.com with the following information:

• Blog name (as you would like it to appear in the YouData application)
• Quick description (for anyone who would like more information about your blog)
• Blog URL
• PayPal account email

And that’s all there is to it!

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If you’re like me, you know that change is good, especially when it comes to sites you look at every day. We all need to change it up a little bit every now and then, which is why sites like MySpace have so many free template sites and the same goes for Blogger and WordPress design templates, why sites like Plurk and Twitter allow you to change the look of your profile, and so on. People do not want to be forced to look at the same thing over and over again. This also applies to the WordPress Admin section. I know that I spend countless hours every week working on my websites; the amount of hours I put in on my websites are the equivalent of two full time jobs, not even factoring in the fact that I also work a full time job from home. With a “job” that you spend up to 80 hours a week on, looking at the WordPress admin panel while you go about your website work can get a little sore on the eyes and very repetitive.

Pressing Pixels thought the same thing and decided to make a plugin to change the look of your WordPress admin panel–WordPress Custom Admin Branding.

The WordPress Custom Admin Branding plugin is a great plugin and makes logging into your WordPress panel again and again a little more refreshing than it would be normally. Here’s a look at what Woman Tribune’s WordPress now looks like:

The WordPress login screen using the WordPress Custom Admin Branding plugin

The WordPress admin dashboard header using the WordPress Custom Admin Branding plugin

The WordPress admin dashboard footer using the WordPress Custom Admin Branding plugin

I definitely recommend this plugin for anyone who is sick of looking at the same old WordPress admin panel. Download the plugin here.

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A service that a great deal of experienced bloggers utilize in order to sell a sponsored review on their website is Sponsored Reviews. With its clean and easy to use interface, I personally find it to be a little less annoying than PayPerPost, which virtually every person with a website has ran to for some extra cash at one point or another. The way Sponsored Reviews works is a little different than what most bloggers are used to. In order to write a sponsored review you must select categories for your website, write a short description about it and then bid on reviews that advertisers have put in the marketplace that match the category in which you have placed your blog under.

Today I have run into something completely new to me when it comes to Sponsored Reviews–The advertisers’ ability to counter offer. While I have only accepted two offers on this website and those have been put on my other website only, I was a little surprised when I saw that an advertiser had sent me a counter offer on a recent bid I had made for this website. As most of you may have heard, Google PageRank has recently updated and when that happens, I always take a few moments to really dig through my statistics and see where this website stands as opposed to other websites in the same niche. After analyzing my overall statistics, I then go through my website listings that I have on services such as Sponsored Reviews and adjust my prices accordingly. Apparently, however, advertisers are likely to disagree with your proposal.

Just a few hours after bidding on a post I received an email of a counter offer over 75% lower than what I had offered in the first place. After wondering for a great deal of time if I had missed something and then realizing that advertisers are just generally known for counter offering bloggers ridiculous prices that are obviously beneath them, I counter offered them–For my original asking price.

So here is a lesson to all of the bloggers who utilize review services in order to help buy the groceries at the end of the month–When your bid receives a counter offer from an advertiser when you know damn well that the price they are countering you for is so obviously beneath you, do not buckle at the mere chance of a few dollars. As a web publisher, you must know where you stand and if you feel your website is worth $5 a post then by all means, you should most definitely be accepting $5 a post; however, if you feel as if your work is worth more, than you should be accepting no less than what you believe you are worth for your work.

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There are many ways that you can make money blogging including putting a PayPal donation button on your site. Most of your readers are not advertisers and so while you can make money from direct advertising on your website, there are still a great deal of people visiting your site and if you write about a great deal of information that appeals to many people and they appreciate the work you have put in to your website in order to bring them the content they crave, some people may love to have the option of donating a little money to you to thank you for your contribution and let you know that they appreciate your hard work.

If anyone has actually seen the PayPal donation button you may have noticed that it is seriously one of the ugliest buttons to ever grace a website. I don’t know what layout the PayPal donation button would look good on, but it honestly looks horrendous on most websites and while it lets your readers donate to you, they don’t get much out of it.

ScratchBack took all of what I’ve already covered into consideration when thinking of a program that would let a website’s readers give back a little. ScratchBack is a program that gives you a fancy shmancy tip jar for your blog. It lets your readers scratch your back and like the saying goes, it also lets you scratch their back in return by providing a link back to their site when they purchase a link using the ScratchBack widget, which you can see in action on my sidebar to the right.

ScratchBack is a great program with an easy to manage control panel, making the entire program fool proof to set up for your website. It is also quite flexible with many color options for you to choose that will match your website’s layout the best and it also lets you pick your own widget rate, giving you complete control over the price of your top spots. By pricing your top spots low you may get more people who purchase a link on your site and scratch your back, but by pricing them a little higher, your links will be more in demand, especially if you choose to only display a certain number of top spots at a time. For instance, on Woman Tribune, our top spots are priced at $25 for an entire month. Looking at that purely from an advertising perspective, you are able to tell me that you appreciate the hard work put into this website and in return, get a link back to your website or blog for about 83 cents a day–A complete steal when you inquire about advertising prices on a website. Even if you don’t have a website of your own and you still want to scratch my back, you can link to your favorite website, a friend’s website or a website that you feel readers of Woman Tribune would be interested in.

To sign up with ScratchBack you can go to their website and you can also check out their blog for exciting industry news. They have also implemented a link directory which is huge, so go on over to their blog directory and submit your link.

Hint hint: Link directories are important because it provides a back link to your website which helps raise your Google PageRank.

We give ScratchBack…
[rating:4/5]

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Web publishers need to constantly be on top of their comments, checking for spam and getting rid of it promptly before viewers see them and suddenly think we condone the buying and selling of illegal pharmaceuticals or we are unnaturally concerned about their personal and intimate relationships. Spam comments are equally bad for everyone involved in a particular website. They are irritating for the webmaster, having to check sometimes daily or even multiple times a day for comments that are inappropriate for the website and are offensive to readers and it also shows readers that a website may not be as professional as it would like to be seen. If a website fails to look the part of a multi-faceted, entertaining and above all, polished and mastered website, it does not matter how well your website does stat-wise, your viewers will not be interested and potential-advertisers will not take you seriously.

Dealing with spam comments can quickly become a second job for a webmaster, especially since the bigger a website gets, the more spam it attracts. The secret is to finding an efficient and user-friendly spam comment program to help eliminate the worry of unprofessional and inappropriate spam. If you are running WordPress, you are most likely still running the spam monitoring system Akismet that came with your original WordPress install; however, there are other programs out there, for WordPress in particular, that I have found to work much better than Akismet.

Defensio is a comment spam monitor and eliminator whose entire mission is based off of outsmarting evil spam, which it does miraculously. In my opinion, you cannot get any better than Defensio for taking the edge off when you’re thinking about how your website is doing and if any spam is leaking through.

With its innovative technology, Defensio actually adapts to the content you post and is proven not to work in the exact same manner for two different bloggers; instead, it adapts to the webmaster’s specific way of managing their comments and follow suite. Every comment that is posted on your website is given a level of “spamminess” and is determined whether or not the level it is given is low enough to be posted. On a personal level, I have seen comments with a spamminess level as low as 20% be held for moderation, just to make sure that it wasn’t someone trying to plug their site or a company looking for some shameless exposure.

With 99.77% accuracy, Defensio definitely gives you the security you need to be a successful, professional and efficient webmaster with absolutely no worry about back doors being left open for spam comments to get away with accessing your content. It tackles comment spam for several different user interfaces such as WordPress, PixelPost, Mephisto, Text Pattern, Movable Type and Drupal. It is also supported by several different web developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Java, Perl, PHP (4 and 5) and Python; all of which can be downloaded here.

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The Ultimate Blog Party is a great place for women bloggers to meet other women bloggers, so naturally, Woman Tribune wants a piece of the cake and in on the action! Last year party had almost 1,000 participators and just with the first day winding down, there are over 400 new blogs that I can’t wait to go through.

If you haven’t heard about The Ultimate Blog Party before, I strongly suggest you head on over and read all about it–You have until March 14 and then the party is over until next year.

To get the party started I thought I would post a fabulous recipe for party punch because what’s a party without punch, right?

Prep Time: 20 minutes
Serves 40

You will need:

• 3 (3 ounce) packages fruit flavored gelatin mix
• 4 cups white sugar
• 13 cups boiling water
• 2 (46 fluid ounce) cans pineapple juice
• 1 (16 ounce) bottle lemon juice concentrate
• 2 (2 liter) bottles ginger ale, chilled

In a large bowl, combine gelatin and sugar. Stir in boiling water until mixture is dissolved. Stir in pineapple juice and lemon juice concentrate. Divide into 2 containers, and freeze until solid.

To serve, place gelatin mixture in punch bowl, and chop into pieces. Pour in ginger ale.

Hmm…I wonder what kind of alcoholic beverage would taste the best in here; and of course, multiple alcohol servings by two for each child that you have.

In addition to discovering countless women bloggers, by participating in The Ultimate Blog Party, you are also eligible to win prizes–and there are over 121 prizes to be given out! I know I have my eye on the KN Cool (R) Daywear from KN Karen Neuburger, the $25 gift certificate to Skin Care Girl and the Skin Care Kit from Hick Chicks Soap Barn. What can I say, I’m a sucker for cute, matching camisoles and panty sets and skin care products.

Have a great time partying! and of course, be sure to check back here frequently because we have a whole lot planned for this community including a link directory and topsite directory to link your website on and increase awareness to your blog–for free, because free advertising is indeed the best advertising and these programs are the few that work! I’ll also be back frequently with news and information on going green, stuff for pets, business, beauty and shopping!

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