Why Popeye popped onto Google’s homepage ?

E.C. Segar, the man behind Popeye the Sailor, received an appropriately raucous birthday message from Google Tuesday. Its home page features the husky hero smacking around Google’s logo and about to swallow a quick serving of his favorite meal, canned spinach.

Today marks what would be the American cartoonist’s 115th birthday.

Elzie Crisler Segar grew up in Illinois and quickly took to drawing. While holding down a job as a film projectionist and background percussionist at a local theater, he pursued cartooning through a correspondence course.

Segar eventually moved to Chicago and created the Thimble Theatre cartoon strip in 1919. After nearly 10 years of Olive Oyl and others gracing its panels, the series introduced a new character – a balding sailor with a perpetually shut eye, anchor tattoos, preposterous forearms, and a curious vocabulary.

Popeye soon outgrew the Thimble Theatre, earning his own cartoon strip, animated series, and live-action movie starring Robin Williams.

The spinach-gulping mariner is the latest in a long line of Google Doodles. Recent highlights include clay duo Wallace and Gromit, H.G. Wells’s mysterious UFOs, and a week’s worth of Sesame Street favorites.

Do you like Google’s new retro logo style? Upset that the lovely Olive Oyl is MIA? Let us know in the comments or join the conversation on Twitter.  http://twitter.com/bradymacdoff

7 Ways to Profit from a Blog

Most bloggers have a goal of making money from their blog. Of course some are content to simply have an outlet to voice their opinions and share their thoughts, but most of us have intentions of profiting financially as well. If that is the case for you, how are you going about achieving this goal? There are plenty of ways to do it, here we’ll take a look at some of them.

Selling Advertising Space

One of the most common ways to monetize a blog is to sell space to advertisers. Blogs with a significant amount of traffic can make a substantial income with ad sales. One of the primary reasons that many blogs choose to sell advertising is that it is a somewhat passive form of income once traffic has been developed. Yes, it does require work to find advertisers and maintain the ads on the blog, but those who can make a reasonable amount of money with ads are able to essentially pay themselves to write for their blog. When compared to some of the other ways to profit from a blog, selling ads can be one of the most consistent revenue streams. If you are able to keep your ad slots filled up you should have a good idea of what you will make each month.

However, there are some negatives that come with selling ads. First of all, you really need to have some established traffic in order to draw interest from potential advertisers. Trying to sell ad space without traffic can be very difficult and will most likely not produce much revenue. Also, your blog will need to target a specific audience in order to get the maximum amount of money for ad space. Obviously advertisers will be willing to pay more if your blog is a direct match with their target market.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are a major source of income for many bloggers. The great thing about affiliate programs is that you have the opportunity to make money even if your blog has a small audience. The bad thing about affiliate programs is that you also have the potential to make no money at all.

New blogs often feature affiliate ads as opposed to selling space directly to advertisers. As I mentioned earlier, selling direct ads is difficult without much traffic, so affiliate programs are a natural fit for new blogs. Additionally, they are easy to maintain and take very little time.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google’s AdSense is of course the most popular method of monetizing a blog with pay-per-click ads. Some websites can make a significant amount of money with AdSense and others (most actually) will make a few dollars at best. Depending on the niche you are in, many of your visitors will completely ignore these ads and never click on them. On the other hand, many website owners have done very well with AdSense.

Paid Writing

There are an increasing amount of paid writing positions becoming available online. While these opportunities will not help you to directly make money through your own blog, they will allow you to make money because of your own blog. Established and well-recognized bloggers can earn good money by writing for others. In this case, your blog essentially becomes a resume or portfolio for your work.

The range of pay for articles will vary greatly, but the opportunity is there. In addition to the income, you’ll get some great exposure and networking opportunities through writing for other blogs. If you are looking for opportunities, Michael Martine wrote a post at Blogging Tips on The Five Best Pro Blogger Job Boards .

Selling Products

Another option is to directly sell your own products through your website. Product sales can be boosted by maintaining a successful blog that draws traffic, builds your credibility, and increases the exposure that the products receive. One of the best examples is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron sells a downloadable e-book that has become recognized as one of the leading authorities on the subject of search engine optimization. Aaron’s blog at SEO Book continually helps to produce more sales and earn more money for him.

Promoting a Service

Service providers have an incredible opportunity to find new clients and increase their rates by blogging. Becoming recognized as an authority in your field will be much easier by maintaining a blog that focuses on your area of expertise. The blog will help potential clients to find you, and the improved reputation that you build, and the corresponding increase in demand for your services, will allow you to charge more for your work.

There are numerous examples of bloggers who are successfully promoting their own services. David Airey is a graphic designer based that specializes in logo design. David’s blog currently has over 3,000 subscribers and it has helped him to achieve solid search engine rankings for phrases that potential clients might use to find a designer. David’s blog is one of his primary methods of finding work.

Premium Content

The final option that we’ll look at in this article is selling premium content. While blogs are huge source of free information, not everything has to be free. Some bloggers and businesses have had success selling some of their best work.

SEOmoz, one of the leading SEO firms, sells memberships on their website that include access to premium content. Members are able to use a variety of SEO-based tools to help optimize their own websites, and there is even some written material available. Selling premium content is possible in just about any field, but you will have to be able to provide something that is worth paying for.

What Methods Do You Use?

I’d like to hear your feedback on what methods you use to profit from your blog. Please feel free to share your own experiences and opinions.

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7 Indispensible and Free Keyword Tools

Most entrepreneurs and small businesses depend on search engine traffic, but are they leveraging search engines as well as they can? Entrepreneurs are beginning to use social media as a lens to find new products and services or innovate and add features to existing products. Social media can be an entrepreneur’s resource for ideas by listening in on amazing personal discussions from the target market the entrepreneur wants to reach and then go develop products for.

For instance, potential customers of high-quality shoes might tweet, or post to Facebook or Friendfeed about the features and benefits they want in shoes, or they might tweet about shoes with an ultra-thin insole that is also increasingly shock resistant to make them even more comfortable. As an entrepreneur looking around for a new product to create, you can use that information to research a “super-thin cushioned insole,” find out if anyone is working on such an insole and then attempt to partner with whomever is developing or creating that super-thin cushioned insole.

However, if you’re starting a new business, you might not have the money to spend on Radian6, so here are seven free tools entrepreneurs can use to research new products and services.

1. Use social media search tools to refine a marketing message that isn’t communicating optimally. Take TweetScan–first come up with terms you care about, then make RSS Feeds out of them and subscribe using Google Reader and regularly scan results to see if you’ve found anything interesting. Look to twitter users who have recently used the terms you’re searching on–and that might be the beginning of forming an “influencer list” for your business.
2. Twitter Search can be used to notify you of events happening nearby that you can leverage for your entrepreneurial efforts, such as meetups or tweetups that happen within a 20 mile radius–often this is the best way to find out about meetings that you might not know about otherwise.
3. Use AdGooRoo’s free business intelligence search tool to find out top keywords and top advertisers. Using AdGooRoo to find keywords and advertisers for “comfortable shoes” yielded additional keywords to feed into Twitter Search and TweetScan as well of a list of competitors that can be studied to improve your business offerings.
4. Use Microsoft’s AdLabs Commercial Intent tool to check the viability that your concept is seen as having commercial value based on the words your using to describe your idea–if not, change your words.  For example, “Ultra-Thin Insoles” is considered to have a 68 percent commercial value while “Comfortable Shoes” is considered by the tool to have a 96 percent commercial value. Finding the right way to describe what you’re looking for will help you find it faster and cheaper, and help you monetize your offerings once your products or services are ready.
5. Use Yahoo! Buzz to improve your marketing copy once you settle on keywords to use to describe what your business offers.  Using Yahoo! Buzz will help you see how others are currently portraying the same things you want to develop or sell.
6. Use Quantcast Marketer to find related terms to the products and services you want to develop and sell, as well as pick up demographic information on who your potential customers might be; the Quantcast Marketer program is free to use and all you have to do is sign up for an account.
7. Use WordStream Free Keyword Tool to supercharge the SEO content of your marketing materials. WordStream Free Keyword Tool has a  continuously updated database of more than a billion of the world’s most popular keywords, aggregating more than a trillion unique searches; once you settle on the right way to describe your new business offering or service, use the right words that drive the most traffic to your startup.

Layering the seven free keyword tools in this article will help your startup take off–before you have to start worrying that it might run out of runway.