Long term readers of this blog know I have a bunch of blogs besides this one and on several of those I practice trend blogging. I’ve thought several times of writing about trend blogging, but I always thought I should probably create a product on this topic. I’ve seen a couple of products on how to do trend blogging and I’ve even read some blog posts on the subject, but non of them have really encompassed the subject well to my experiences.

Some of the suggestions I’ve seen is to watch the Hot Trends and then create a blogger blog or Squidoo lens on the current topic. The main idea in these types of strategies is to hope Google comes along and ranks your blogger blog. Personally I don’t think this is a valid strategy. It can sometimes takes days before a new blog is indexed and by then the hot trend is normally over. I’ve also seen people who set up autoblogs with various plugins that will monitor the trends and scrap related posts from around the web. Well  this sort of works, even though it does not really convey a moral attitude to blogging as you are basically stealing someone else’s work.

Now saying that I might as well confess that I’ve done this. It can pull in some traffic and you can make some money, but its not really anything to build a business on, not to mention you will either get a DCMA request for stealing content and eventually Google is going to deindex the site and you won’t make any money no matter how many posts you make.

The other way and the method I’ve been able to successfully use to create a stable income from Trend blogs is to have a generic domain name and then manually monitoring the trends throughout the day and then writing short or sometimes long unique posts on the subject. I’ve found this to be the best way, but it does require a good amount of work, but the cool thing is once you build a site up in this manner then you have continued traffic from the search engines to content which is not even on the hot trends any longer.

If you look at the Huffington Post and analyze it then you should realize their main strategy is following trends. Now some people may say they are a news site and that is true as most trend blogs will contain a lot of news type stories as that is the type of topics that come up in trends more than anything else.

Of course there is a little more to this than just posting reviews of news stories and this area is where I differ in my approach. I may put together a little report and just give it away to my subscribers. I had thought of doing this and selling it, but giving it away would be better. I’ll try to get to work on this during the coming week and explain my methods for Trend Blogging.

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I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while but I had a good reason. This is always been a hobby to me and not something I really used to earn money but that’s about to change one thing that I’m going to do to make my life a little easier is to use Dragon Naturally Speaking in conjunction with live writer for my blogging activities I’ve tried Dragon Naturally Speaking prior to version 10. But I was never able to train it to my voice. Version 10 of Dragon Naturally Speaking is a little different. I just got it last night installed on my computer. My hopes were not high for Dragon Naturally Speaking as with version 8 I was never able to have it understand me with any level of accuracy. Well version 10 is a lot different.

At the moment I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 to type this blog post. While it does make some mistakes he does understand what I’m saying for the most part. The cool part about this is that typing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a lot faster than typing normally. This is one of the reasons I have not really kept up with a site like I should have. I just don’t have the time to keep up with this site because it does not a lot of money and as a result I spend my time on other tasks which do earn me money. But with the increased time I say by using this software then perhaps I can keep up with this site as well as my many others. I’ve never been a fast typist and I’ve always wanted to improve my speed but typing fast is just not in my abilities talking fast is another story. While it may take get some getting used to as I realize I do not tie the same as I speak and it does make some mistakes which I must correct. The four were some instances and as I get used to it I should do a better job and things should flow better.

Of course Dragon Naturally Speaking is not going to help with SEO. So, I will still be forced to utilize my keyboard to perform SEO type tasks. Right now I’m looking at probably 80% accuracy rate as I speak this blog post. Which is not really really bad. The one thing is a kind of messes me up with my flow of writing in this post does not seem like a normal blog post from me. But regardless perhaps I will give it a shot anyway as this is really helping my speed with typing a blog post. Right now I spent less than five minutes on this blog post and from looking at it I have a couple hundred words maybe 250. At this rate I can probably speak blog post a lot faster than I can actually write them. Of course it means my process for writing blog posts will need to change I will need to put it in my heated prior to actually starting to speak the blog post. Well this is all for now I just want to see how this would work out and it looks okay I’m have to do a little editing to this post and I may change a couple worked around here and there but for the most part I’m very please with Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10. So what blogging tools do you use have you considered? Dragon Naturally Speaking it may be worth the money no matter what your accent I have a South Georgia accent and it understands me just fine now. Of course this was not always true with version 8 it was a total disaster. But version 10 is definitely an upgrade.

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Well Wordpress 2.5 has  finally been released. I’ve seen the screenshots of 2.5 on various sites for a couple of weeks now. Well I just upgraded and the screen shots did not do the application justice. The new interface is so easy to get around. Took a couple of minutes before  I found everything, but once  I did find it I can say its a lot easier  to navigate.

The media gallery looks fairly cool. I’m not sure how much I will use that functionality because I blog using Windows Live Writer and very rarely utilize the posting functions of wordpress any longer. I may have to make a couple of posts from the back end just to see how it works out.

I also noticed they is a new book on Amazon around Wordpress 2.5. I looked through the table of contents and it mostly looks like its tailored towards beginning users. Afterall it is one of the For Dummies series which does not mean a lot, but in my experience these books tend to lean more towards the just learning platform. Looks like there is not a lot on building plugins and only a couple of small chapters on modifying themes. I may run by the bookstore and see if I can lay my hands on it. Depending on what is inside I may pick up a copy. If it could really explain building plugins in a no nonsense manner then I would definitely buy a copy.

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