Don’t you just love competitions? And @Bbrian017 over at Blog Engage has another amazing competition running through February, yes, that’s this month and as usual with any of the Blog Enage competition, this one has some truly amazing prizes up for grabs!

Anyhoo, enough of the chit-chat let’s get on to the do’s and don’ts on how you can win in this brilliant big prize competition and a mention of the sponsors.

Start Date

February 1st, 2012

End Date

February 29th 2012

Prizes

First Place – $250 USD
Second Place – $150 USD
Third Place – $100 USD

The Rules

First let’s discuss some of the rules. It’s very important you read and follow these rules as it will determine if your going to be included into the contest or not. In order to enter you have to write an article about the contest including our sponsor links on your blog. You can find the sponsor link code below. Please if you are entering our $500 USD guest blogging contest make sure to write about our contest and link to our sponsors prior to posting your guest article on our blog.

Who can participate?

All Blog Engage members can write for us and have the opportunity to win any prize offered in this contest. We only ask that you have a valid paypal account to accept your winnings and prizes. If you are not a member please purchase an account and or sign up to a RSS and Marketing Package.

Post Guidelines

1. Guest posts must be at least 900 words, not to exceed 2000 words.

2. You may have as many links as you wish in the body of the content. However, please limit links to your projects or websites to your bio. Absolutely no affiliate links allowed.

3. Your bio must have a Gravatar. Please use a picture of yourself and not a logo.

4. Keep your post relevant to the overall theme of this blog. You can write about any of the following topics Making Money Online, Blogging Tips, Traffic, Design, Social Networking, SEO, Marketing, Technology and other industry or niche specific topics you think blog engage members would be interested in reading.

How To Win

• You must be a member of the blog engage community

• You must write about the contest including the contest sponsors links When done e-mail Brian the link

• Register for an account here and fill out your bio info Also please get a gravatar if you don’t have one.

• Contact Brian at admin (@) blogengage dot com letting him know your username

• He will review your account and upgrade it so you can write for the blog

• Write your post, save it and it will be reviewed and published

• A high value is placed on the number of and quality of comments received on your guest post. Also, be sure to interact with and respond to your commentators. This will help you win! Ambiguous and/or spammy comments will not help you.

• Spread the word about your post through all your social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Sphinn, etc. A high value will be placed on number of Tweets and overall social media promotion.

The Points System

Tweets, 50 points per tweet up to a max of 15000 points
Linked In Votes, 50 points per vote, up to a max of 15000 points
Facebook Likes, 50 points per tweet up to a max of 15000 points
Google Plus, 50 points per Plus up to a max of 15000 points
Engages at Blog Engage, 100 points per Engage (vote) Unlimited points
Comments that provide value, 10 points per comment Unlimited Points

Meet the Blog Engage Bloggers Contest Sponsors

SEO and SEM services
Wholesale Greenhouse Supplies
Hydroponics Equipment
Greenhouse Equipment
Greenhouses
Garden Gifts
Gardening Articles
SEO Agency UK
Deal of the day

 

So why not enter the competition as soon as you can, the quicker the better and good luck

Tags: BlogEngage, contest, Social Networking

Its been a fantastic year for the Blazing Minds blog and over the past 12 months the blog has grown in its popularity with more commentators stopping by, some amazing guest bloggers producing some very interesting and informative posts and recently a loss of the blog due to it becoming so popular that I had to upgrade its hosting, big thanks to Tim @EvoHosting for sorting that one out for me

So as we are nearly at the end of the year I thought its time to bring you a tasty Infographic of the Blazing Minds Top Posts For 2011, thanks to @DragonBlogger for the inspiration on this and for the advice on how to get this working on my blog
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Blazing Minds, Blog, Online Communities, Social Networking, Top Posts for 2011, Twitter

If you thought some men might have a little too much free time on their hands, you may be right.

According to Mashable, close to 87 percent of Google+ users are in fact male. The data comes from third-party site SocialStatistics, which compiled the data from select profiles. Another data provider, FindPeopleOnPlus, states that nearly 74 percent of Google+ users are men.

Digging a little deeper into the data, FindPeopleOnPlus notes that 95 percent of Google+ users who claim to be “looking for love” on the site are men.

According to the Mashable report, some six out of 10 users claim to be web developers or software engineers. Perhaps these guys are thinking the Internet is the way to meet women?

Should it shock us that more men are using Google+ to date than women?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Google, social media, Social Networking

 

 Tip #1: Direct Advertising

There are various companies that want to promote their products through Twitter. Nevertheless, these companies will need a high click-through rate of the tweets. The click-through rate of your tweets can be determined by URL Tracking services like bit.ly or su.pr. In addition, you will require a huge number of followers. Hence, if you have a good click-through ratio as well as a large number of followers, then advertising is a good alternative.

Tip #2: Monetizing the Twitter Profile Background
The background of your Twitter profile can help you earn some bucks as well. There are websites, such as Twittad.com, which provide services in order to help you monetize your Twitter Background Page. Advertisers who express an interest in you will place a background picture on your profile, which will effectively promote their company. You can choose the duration and price at which you wish to charge your advertiser. Once that is done, Twittad will use the Twitter API to upload the advertisement onto your Twitter profile.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Online Communities, social media, Social Networking, Twitter

It’s been a while since I last brought you some Twitter Tips, so I thought I would bring you some quite useful for those of you wanting to know when the best time to tweet is and when your followers are on-line to see your tweets.

So How Do You Do This?

One Twitter Tool for doing this very thing is Tweriod, is quick and quite simple to use and the stats are ones which you can use for the purposes of finding out when your best times are for tweeting out those all important tweets on Twitter.

Simply sign in with Twitter, don’t worry you don’t have to enter your password, and then Tweriod will start working out your statistics, as soon as they are don you will get a DM on Twitter from them to let you know that everything is ready for you to view.

Reading Your Statistics

The nice thing about this handy Twitter Tool is the graphs, all your stats. are listed in graph format so that they are easy to read and understand.

Need to know more? Then read on

Tags: Online Communities, Social Networking, Trending and Popularity, Twitter

As some of you may know, the Shorty Awards are now taking nominations, so it’s now time for me to ask my loyal readers of my blog and followers of my Twitter @BlazingMinds to be kind enough to vote for me in the 3rd Annual Shorty Awards.

The Shorty Awards honour the best people and organizations on Twitter and social media. Nominations may be made through Twitter and this website, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in dozens of official categories, as well as thousands of crowd-sourced categories. For the first time, the Shorty Awards will also honor the industry’s best agencies and social media professionals.

It’s really easy to vote for me, you can either click on the banner on the right of the screen, this will then take you direct to my profile page on the Shorty Awards where you can vote for me or you can simple vote for me direct from Twitter by tweeting something like:

• I nominate @BlazingMinds for a Shorty Award in #socialmedia because… (add reason here)
• You can also tweet shorter votes like this: #shortyawards @BlazingMinds #socialmedia (add quick reason here). This shorter format is helpful if you want to vote from a party, on the road, in a meeting, or on a boat
• Be as creative as you want with the reason
• A tweet that does not give a reason for the nomination will not be counted
• The nomination must be relevant to the category

There are several categories available on the BlazingMinds page at the Shorty Awards, so if you think #SocialMedia doesn’t fit, then you can easily choose another one of your choice.

So there you have it and thank you to everyone who has already voted for me and to those of you that will be voting for me, thank you everyone

Related articles

• Nominations begin for social media Shorty Awards (holykaw.alltop.com)
• The 3rd Annual Shorty Awards, The Best of Short Real-Time Content (laughingsquid.com)
• Shorty Awards spotlight best of Twitter (web2list.com)

Tags: awards, Online Communities, Shorty Award, social media, Social Networking, Voting

There I was surfing the net as I do and I decided to do my daily visit to my favourite blogging community, BloggerLuv and came across a post from John titled “Pick your poison” so I thought I might as well re-vamp this post that I originally posted back in September 2010

Those of you who read my blog often will have seen a post I’ve made in the past about a blogger community website called BloggerLuv, since then the site has gone from strength to strength.

One of the reasons for this is the way that fellow bloggers use the site and how friendly, and helpful, they all are on BloggerLuv. If you are stuck for some help with your blogging or even having trouble with some coding on your blog, there is always someone who is willing to help you out.

I on many occasions have taken the opportunity to ask for some help from my fellow bloggers and they always come through with the likes of @Ileane, @jsinkeywest, @growmap and @simplehomeorg to name a few giving good friendly and much-needed advise and blogging tips n tricks.

You can also link up with FaceBook and even Twitter to post out status updates from BloggerLuv:

And as you can see I added a hash tag, I do occasionally This also helps promote the blogging community out to the twittersphere, I do the same with my blog and add #BlazingMinds, little tip there for you

One of the other advantages of being a member of the BloggerLuv Community is the ability to post your links to your blog and increase your readers, it’s worked for me, with a bit of traffic now coming from the website and some new blog commentators stopping by and leaving their pennies worth.

There is so much more you can do on BloggerLuv, but probably the best way to meet all these wonderful bloggers is to stop by and see for yourself, stop for a while and check out what’s going on at the forums, groups and more.

Since becoming a member of BloggerLuv and writing this post originally back in September 2010, my blogging friendships as rocketed, I now know loads of helpful bloggers who are always willing to help me out if I need any help. Not only can I chat with other bloggers I can also post what ever I like in the form of a blog post, great for getting things off my chest

So stop on by say hello to me at the BloggerLuv Blogging Community and check it out

Tags: blogging community, Social Networking, social networks