Newsletter set up via Google Groups

As I'm sure you can see above, I've created a new Google Group for readers of this blog. When you join, you'll be emailed each new blog post as I make it. In addition, I'll be posting goodies in the "files" section of the group, such as demo chapters of current and future products. I'll also be sending out some subscriber-only, premium content that I won't be posting to this blog.

Now, as some of you know, using free groups with your blog to serve as subscription and email list features. However, for this blog, for the first time, I'm using Google Groups Beta, which has a snazzier navigation, and some additional features that the original Google Groups did not. I'm not fully up to speed on those yet, but I'm sure I'll be able to think of some clever things to do with them.

What's currently occupying my mind is how to automate info-product customers getting an email with the download link to the product, as well as a good free place to host the sales letter and thank you pages, so that I can make this entire operation run off of free public services. I'll keep you all posted when I get to that point.

Anyway, I've spent my 2 hours today on this blog (I'm giving it a lot of attention!) so I'm going to sign off!

Talk soon!

New name and new features planned

So with the help of the Warrior Forum and my wife, I've settled onto a title for the blog: Building Blocks for Building Blogs. I think it's pretty catchy, and says exactly what it is I'm trying to lay out here.

I plan to spend a couple of hours a day, roughly six days a week on this blog. This is kind of the thing I plan to work on in 2007, but since I'll have a few days to myself for the holiday weekend, I figured I'd get a head start.

Something new to me about this blog is that I'm using the "new" Blogger for the first time. It came out of Beta earlier this week and I was surprised when I visited the login page to check on my blogs. I'm well familiar with their old service, but I'd held off switching over until they made me do it. They're not forcing me to switch my old blogs, but since this is a new blog, I've been pushed into using the new platform.

I have to say, I like the changes so far. Trackbacks and Labels have been added, so I'll be exploring those features. Also, the new layout editing tools are cool, and allow me to do more customizations faster. I'm having trouble with it and getting errors here and there with the interface while I was experimenting with creating AdSense blocks and moving them around and resizing them. No biggie though - I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.

Some other features and cool stuff that I'll be adding:
* A new Google Group devoted to the blog and my writing projects where I can share files and communicate with my readers via email. When it's ready, you'll see the subscription form here on this site.
* I'm going to be implementing some free poll software here and surveying the users of my e-book projects to see where they feel I should go next. I'd like to know where my readers feel I should develop my tactics and clarify my explanations, or even add more variation or functionality or whatever.
* I've had a lot of questions about other blogging software and other ad networks and other techniques than the ones I use. Any experiments I implement will all be referenced here so my readers can see in real-time the kind of things I'm trying out. Hopefully I can broaden my own horizons while answering your questions.
* I'm going to launch my prior e-book products on the public market and use the traffic to this blog to bring attention to them. I figure, if you end up here, reading these words, my techniques must work pretty well, right? To do this though, I'm going to switch from a hosted domain and try to utilize free web hosting to run the entire operation. I want to see if it's REALLY necessary to have your own hosting accounts and domains. I suspect that the web is much more forgiving than it used to be.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts I'm putting out there and you'll be seeing a lot more here over the course of next year, and hopefully it will be interesting enough to keep you coming back. See you soon, I hope!

Proof of Concept

So chances are, at this early stage, you probably know me from the various forums I hang out in where I've become kind of a proponent for building a large web presence using ONLY free web-based services. I like to think that I've come up with a lot of novel ways to integrate these tools into something that no one else is really doing. I use my "system" to maintain 30 to 40 active blogs( in various niches and communities) a week, all of which have active readership.

Since my participation in several forums has garnered an interest in my process, I ended up writing and selling a report about it (which has proven very successful). In addition to that, I wanted to set up a kind of "meta" blog where I talk about blogging in general, perhaps review free tools and services as I come across them, and have a test-bed, where I can publicly try out new widgets and services and things to see if I want to permanently add them to my system or not.

So, that being said, I plan on spending a significant portion of my spare time on this blog, so I hope you'll check back often for content updates, and I hope you find the information I post here useful in your own efforts to create, maintain, and promote your own web presence with zero to low out-of-pocket expenses.

Talk soon!