The Controversial Marketer's Blog Meme

Sam Freedom has started a new meme at his controversial marketing blog. While I'm not sure just how controversial the Controversy Meme is, it's a meme that meets with my top criteria for a good meme. It's actually useful and if you've looked into memes at all, you'll know how rare a thing that is. Most of them are really just little fluffs of nonsense and barley disguised attempts to generate backlinks. Generating backlinks is fine, but we could at least provide something useful for the readers when we do it, and Sam does this well.

The Meme And It's Particulars

Sam's list of criteria for his meme were:

1. It must fit in with the "controversy" theme (of his blog).
2. It has to take bloggers down "the road less traveled (no ordinary controversies).
3. It has to have MASSIVE teaching potential; and
4. It has to be FUN.

And his Meme Rules are:

1. Blog about THREE to FIVE (3-5) secret or cool ways you know how to obtain something valuable outside the established order. These will be some of the unexpected, ways of getting needs met whether for your blogs, or for life, in general (you'll see my examples in a moment).
2. Begin by including 1 link to this post with a mention of it as the origin of the Controversy Meme; and 1 link pointing to, and naming, the person who tagged you.
3. End by linking to, and notifying, 5 other bloggers you admire or think would enjoy sharing their homegrown wisdom;
4. Use the Technorati Tag for Controversy Meme. Since these are going to be real secrets, tips and tricks, each person's contribution will be more than mere likes and dislikes but will actually have some significant value. Using the Technorati Tag for "Controversy Meme" will make them all accessible from one place (feel free to use other tags, too, such as "blog memes" or "memes").

My Entry In The Meme

Since my overriding theme here is blogging and specifically niche blogging my three "secrets" are tools and ideas to enhance blogging activities, that aren't the normal things people mention when they talk about blogging. Each of these is something I use on a regular basis, and while two of them have paid versions, all three have free versions that are completely sufficient for helping you become a better niche blogger

Put your research and organization productivity into overdrive
I use a little known program called TreePad to organize my thoughts, research, blog schedules, routine procedures and a lot more. It's an out liner, or personal information manager application with a lot of really great features. When you're reading blogs, doing keyword research, designing a blog theme, hunting for information or doing anything that would profit from a logical outline you can set it all up in TreePad and boost your productivity through the roof. There is a freeware version of the program available and will probably serve just fine for nearly anything you want to do.

Find images in just the right color to use on your blog. Yotophoto's advanced search form has a test field for you to enter a hex value for a color. There is also a convenient color picker if you aren't a whiz with hex codes. Simply select a color that you like (or that matches your blog, or the feel of your article, add in any keywords and hit the search button. The resulting search will contain photos that are license for re use that are centered on your color choice. You'll save a lot of time here too because yotophoto searches several of the creative commons and public domain image sources at once.

Keep a search log of common searches with Copernic Agent, a desktop meta search tool. This program searches several search engines (and other data sources as well) simultaneously. It eliminates duplicate results automatically, and can validate the results and remove any that aren't there anymore. You can save your searches and organize them into folders to update the results whenever you want with a single click. Finally, the best part is that you can export your results to several formats. I use this to excerpt results to a .csv file and use those files to track results changes over time in an Excel spreadsheet.

People whos secret tips and tools I want to read

Here are the bloggers I'm tagging with this meme.

Stephen Cronin at More Than Scratch The Surface is a source of some great sideways approaches to blogging. He's also just updated his dual feeds plugin that lets your readers choose between full text and excerpted feeds, putting that controversy to bed once and for all. I know he's got a few secret tolls and techniques we would all benefit from. He's not a meme guy though and he may just UNmeme me. ;)

Maki at doshdosh who combines cool anime illustrations with phrases like "Content dissemination", "supportive core audience" and "monopolize link attribution" in a minimalist clean theme to "help people make money on line". I'd really like to see Maki dish some little known stuff on link baiting in this meme.

Tiffany Sanders at RockStories is a professional writer, meaning she earns her living from writing. She tells us that anyone can become a writer, and that many of the things we uninitiated see as insurmountable barriers are myths, or at least not as fierce as commonly believed. I'd love to read some secrets from her on writing and getting more from your writing online.

And I'm gonna break the rules at this point. While Sam said I was supposed to tag five other bloggers, I'm going to keep me contributions and my tags in balance by tagging just these three. However, if you'd like to be tagged with this meme, and haven't bee, let me know and I'll add a tag to you.