The Visa Business Network Invites Mirna Bard to Help Mentor 100,000+ Business Owners

A couple months ago, Visa Business Network’s Outreach team discovered my blog and reached out by completing the form on my site to let me know that they find my blog to be very impressive and a valuable resource to businesses. They asked if they could feature my blog on the Visa Business Network as [...]

10 Instant Blog Post Templates to Help You Write Articles in 30 Minutes or Less

I am a natural born writer, so writing has always come easy to me. But, when I had to start writing articles everyday for my blog, for my newsletter and for article submission – I quickly ran out of article topics.
Then one day as I was reviewing all of my articles, I realized that there [...]

Timing and Frequency: Two Keys to Blogging Success

When you read tips about blogging, it almost always comes down to “content is king.” And there’s certainly truth to that statement. If you don’t have quality, compelling content, you’re never going to have a successful blog. People won’t have any incentive to read it.
However, there’s a flipside to this that rarely gets discussed. That [...]

Case Study: Chef Zov Karamardian of Orange County Takes On Social Media

Recently, I had the pleasure of connecting on Twitter and Facebook with Chef Zov Karamardian (@Zovs), an award-winning chef, restaurateur and bestselling cookbook author. Chef Zov jumped on the social media bandwagon a few months ago, learning and embracing as much as she can.
As part of her social media strategy, Chef Zov announced the [...]

7 WordPress Plug-ins to Help You Control Content Scraping

Here are eight WordPress plug-ins that may help you better monitor your blog posts, as promised in yesterday’s blog post 9 Ways to Reduce Scraping and Catch Blog Post.
Simple Feed Copyright Plug-in – This adds a copyright notice at the bottom of feed articles.
©Feed Plug-in – This can add the copyright, a digital fingerprint [...]

9 Ways to Reduce Scraping and Catch Blog Post Theft

Content scraping or theft is when original content is stolen from a blog to republish on another blog or site.  This is considered to be plagiarism or copyright infringement, but since the Web is not completely regulated yet, scraping has become an extremely common problem.  Although, this process can be done manually, normally it is [...]

Ask Mirna: Will My Blog Be Penalized for Duplicate Content?

QUESTION:
“What is the impact on your blog rankings if you take some of the blog posts and repackage them as e-zine articles? Effectively, you are using the content twice. Will my blog rankings be penalized? If so, how much?” — Rob B.

ANSWER:
The duplicate content penalty is used by Google and other major search engines [...]

Book Review: “Social Media Marketing: Market Your Real Estate & Mortgage Business Using the Power of Social Media”

I just finished reading “Social Media Marketing: Market Your Real Estate & Mortgage Business Using the Power of Social Media” eBook written by my good friend Naomi Trower, real estate broker and social media extraordinaire. I met Naomi in 2009 at the LA Twitter Conference, and we’ve kept in touch through Facebook and Twitter [...]

12 Ways to Boost Blog Visitors

What blog doesn’t need more visitors and eye balls?  A few days ago I posted six reasons why you need a business blog.  Today we’re going to look at how to increase the traffic to your blog using some pretty simple methods.
1. Comment on other blogs. It literally takes a few minutes to find blogs [...]

6 Reasons Why You Need a Business Blog

If you don’t currently have a blog for your business web site, it’s high time you set one up. Even businesses with no writing staff can manage by hiring ghostwriters or inviting guest bloggers. You can also work on posts ahead of time and schedule them to run over time. I schedule a [...]