When we write a blog, the majority of us follow a simple finite process. We write the article and then it normally ends there. We may do a few “Get Rich Quick” activities that could boost the article’s traffic and may spur a bit of discussion around the article – but that’s it. The blog’s life is over until someone goes on an archive binge and finds that same article years later. Why treat your blog like that? You’ve put some serious time and intellectual property into a piece of writing that you want to be proud of. So why end there? It’s because naturally we are a lazy bread and want our hard work to do our tedious work for us. We want our work to create an infinite realm of discussion and revenue generation, and that is not possible unless you have thousands of back links and are considered to be an industry leader.

The original traffic and relationship model will have the content sending traffic to the website and the content sending and receiving traffic from outside websites (as well as your own). This has each medium of traffic interacting on a very 2D, vertical level. Thus, minimizing traffic and the scope of the article.

So, let’s think about each of our blog articles in an infinite sense. When you write a blog it doesn’t expand outside of your website. You may comment on a few related blogs, which are normally along the lines of “Hey, I wrote an article about this the other day [place link of article here]!” But, how does that advance conversation and thought on that related article? It doesn’t, the comment will merely lay dormant on that site. So, in order to create an infinite blog you have to extend your article elsewhere. You do this by considering everything you write on related blogs, sites and communities to be an extension of your original article. So the model should now look somewhat like this:

Thus, the blog’s content is ever expanding and should be treated that way. An analogy that I often use is that people treat websites in an infinite manner but treat the content in a finite manner. When in reality you should treat your content almost like a separate website with its own micro-marketing strategy. I’m not going to explain how to implement this idea into your blogs or your websites. However, in order to achieve success with a website you must create a web of qualified traffic streams. Therefore, you must treat all the marketing you do as an extension of your article, blog or website.

This cry is also in part of my ongoing work on trying to make the internet less saturated with bull. Every time you steal a qualified visitor with spam you steal from my revenue - So.. I hate you.

Blogging has a fundamental problem - it’s tedious nature. Sure it’s easy to write content, but getting the blog ready for the public eye is simply not fun. Adding hyperlinks, tags, categories and pictures are a lengthy and boring process. As such, I have at least four blogs in my backlog that are completely written but I haven’t optimized with links, pictures and the like. But thanks to my new knight in shining armor (Zemanta) this issue is completely solved.

Zemanta is a simple plugin for FireFox and IE that works on all major blogging platforms. It overlays a bunch of actions overtop of your writing manager on your blog. It suggests tags, related articles, images, links found within your content, as well as offers a “reblog” button (as seen below) that allows visitors to blog about your article in a simple format.

The program uses semantic technology (ooo, semantics my fav!) in order to produce very precise results. I’ve seriously found no problems with this program. It solves exactly what it has set out to do and I’m sure the future of the program is quite optimistic. In conjunction to this the program is open API - I smell mashups! I use this on all my blogs.

I did some basic math on how much time I spend on these activities. I spend roughly twenty minutes a day - researching possible links, images and smart tags for each of my blogs. That translates to 2 hours and 20 minutes a week, 10 hours a month or 120 hours a year (or 5 days). This is just for one of my blogs, I host and run about five blogs which means I lose about 25 days a year tagging, linking and finding images for my blogs. Thank you Zemanta!

The only funding that the company has seen is seed funding of $1.5 million.

So the fantastic people at GetElastic.com(click) are offering a whole bunch of free stuff in their fall contest. Entering is simple; you just have to get a co-worker, friend, family member or someone off the street to subscribe to their RSS Feed (click for it!). The prizes include: One free day pass to the Shop.org Annual Summit, Two free full conference passes to Online Marketing World, One free conference pass to Search Marketing Expo (SMX East), and finally a signed copy of Avinash Kaushik’s must have book “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day”. The draw date is on September the Third so hurry!