Blogger In Draft - Try Some Cool Features Before Your Blogger Buddies

Blogger in Draft allows bloggers to try out new Blogger features before they're available on regular Blogger. You can add a You Tube video bar which allows you to pick videos to display on your sidebar based on any topic or keyword you choose. The newsreel feature allows the same kind of customization. And for those of you who know about widgets and gadgets, Blogger in Draft allows you to add any of the thousands of available Google widgets to your Blogger sidebar. I've chosen two other new features:

The Google search bar I added allows you to search any term on this blog as well as any term on any of the other blogs I link to on my blogosphere sidebar. So if you're searching for an article but you're not sure if you read it here or on one of the other blogs, you can easily find it. The Google search bar can also be set to search an entire site or the entire web.

And if you use a reader to keep up with your favorite blogs whenever a new post is added, I've added a feature that allows you to add this blog to any one of five different readers, Google, Bloglines, Atom Feed, Netvibe, Newsgator, & MyYahoo.

Since these features are beta versions currently being tested, understand that Blogger in Draft features can be changed or pulled at any time.

Note: I've decided to delete the reader feature from Blogger and replace it with something else. The reader feature was making the site load too slowly. I found a fantastic alternative. What is it? I'll let you know in my next post. Be patient my dears.

It's The New Year

Do you have a business plan? Now is the time to review your practices from 2007, decide what worked and what didn't, and plan out your marketing strategy for 2008. Decide on your goals; what do you want to make in 2008, how many new clients do you plan on picking up, how much do you want your business to grow, and how you're going to achieve this. Where are you going to spend your marketing money? What brought you business and what didn't?

A business plan doesn't have to be formal. Just write down what you want to accomplish and how you plan on doing it.

Where Should You List Your Notary Services?

It seems that we're bombarded on a daily basis by listing companies, websites, and advertisers who want our money to list our notary services with them. They all claim to be different, they all claim that they're the premiere notary site, they all claim that they'll attract business. How do you know what to believe? Most signing agents agree that the top sites to list your notary services generally include Signingagent.com, Notary Rotary, 123Notary, GoMobileNotary, and GoGetNotary. Other than that, list yourself on any free sites you can find.

As far as the other gazillion places that want you to pay to list with them, it's important to do your due diligence. First of all, check to see how well they do in Google and other search engines. If you search for terms like "signing agent" or "mobile notary" and their listing doesn't come up on the first few pages, then who's really finding them anyway? In addition, I have the Google Toolbar with Pagerank installed on my Internet Explorer browser. Pagerank measures the relative importance of a site from zero to ten, so a zero or one Pagerank probably doesn't bode well for the visibility of a listing site. I also have the Alexa Toolbar on my Firefox browser. Alexa provides statistics on a site's popularity. Although Alexa stats aren't exact and can sometimes be manipulated, it can still help give you an overall view of a site's usefulness.

For more information on the various directories including a list of some free directories, GoGetNotary has an excellent article.