Culture ID 2155 (0x086B) is not a supported culture
I recently came across a VERY annoying problem on my personnal (this one) BlogEngine.Net blog.
What happened is that I installed some Windows Updates (a bunch) on my Windows Server 2003 server and then, every time I accessed an article of this blog I received this error message : Culture ID 2155 (0x086B) is not a supported culture. What a real annoying problem !!
I don't know the exact reason but what I know is that cultures are OS specific, so the Windows Update is the cause... it's not related to the .Net Framework so don't waste your time trying to reinstall the framework, it will not work.
The Solution...
Resintall the Service Pack 2 for your Windows Server 2003.
Monetizing a blog; there are many ways to do it
A lot of people I know all want to find a way to make money with the Internet. Yeah, a lot of people do make money on the world wide web. There is severals ways to do it. Today, I'll focus on how to make money with a blog.
First, a blog has to provide something good to your readers. If you only rewrite articles you find on the web, you will not be able to attract readers, you will only have search engine traffic. Everyday readers are the key to succes, so when you offer something they like on a specific niche, they will subscribe to your feed and read your articles.
An important thing to respect is that blogs are by definition FREE, so never think about asking your readers to pay to read your articles; you will simply never get readers.
Before reading ways to monetize a blog, you need to always remember this : traffic, traffic, traffic. If you don't bring people to your website, you will never make a dime with it, even if you follow every tip you can find here.
1. Advertising
Advertising is simple, you place banners on your site and when people click on ads shown in those banners, you get money. Sometimes you get money only because ads are being shown (a 1000 of time).
The most paying advertising program is Google AdSense. You can also try Yahoo! Ads and Microsoft AdCenter. There is some other small companies that try to emerge in the world of advertising so you can give it a try but, for my personnal opinion (and experience), use Google AdSense.
2. Advertising for RSS feeds
Because your readers will probably subscribe to your feeds to read you everyday, they will probably never visit your blog again (or rarely), so that means the ads you display on your website will not reach your readers and you will not make money. The way you can display ads to your readers is by displaying them on your feeds. As far as I know, this feature is only available in Google AdSense (use with FeedBurner).
3. Donations
In addition to ads, you can provide a way for your readers to send you money when they like what you do. It's more common than you think to be paid by readers, so don't neglate it. It will never be your most money-generating feature but you don't lose anything by putting a simple PayPal donate button on your blog. Because you want your readers to be able to easily send you money, you have to use PayPal.
4. Affiliate programs
Like advertising, affiliate programs are banners that you put on your websites. Unlike advertising, you don't generally get paid when readers click on your ads but instead you get paid when the condition of the program is met. Conditions can be things like "when a user clicks and then create an account" or "when a user clicks and the buy something in the next 90 days". These programs are well-paying because they normally offer great commisions. For a simple account created it can be between 1$ and 10$ and for a sell it can be up to 50% of the total price.
There is one thing you need to be aware of... you need to redirect very well targeted traffic if you want to generate conversions on the other website because if you redirect people interested in dating on sites that talks about weight loss...
Blogs: What makes a post, a good post
Many people on the web write on their blogs. Some people have their own domain name they paid for (like I do) while some others decide to go with free or cheap blog hosting (like Blogger and TypePad) so they don't have to worry about the domain name and the blog engine hosting.
There is all kind of articles, ways to write and subjects so it is difficult to tell exactly what makes a post a good post. But, there is some general rules you should follow.
1. Create content
That is by far the most important rule to follow. You can't always create new stuff, but what you should avoid is to "copy" (or be too inspired by) an existing article. With Google, when someone writes and article about something, anyone will be able to find it, so writing the same thing that has already been wrote is useless.
2. Create valuable content
It's not because you write new content that you write valuable (good) content. The simple rule for this is read your article like if you were someone else. If you find it interesting and think you learned something then it is valuable.
Remember, if your readers don't like what they read, they will stop reading you.
3. Write medium-length articles
A normal-length article should not make you scroll more than 3 pages. If you have long articles you will discourage you readers. I'm not talking theoricaly here. When I see long posts in my Google Reader I read the first lines and even if it's interesting I never read the complete article. Time is money, so people will not spend 30 minutes reading a single article when they can have about 10-200 articles to read per day (depending on how many blogs they read).
As opposed to this, don't make 2-phrases articles. Your readers don't want to waste their time but they want content so if you write a very small article, be sure you at least give some links for them to surf and read. There is time where little articles are welcome, like if there's a big announcement of something like this, then you can link to the main article with a paragraph or two.
In general, keep your articles readable within 2-5 minutes.
4. Be you
Don't try to write articles like you think people will like it. Write them like you are telling 3-4 friends about what you're writing. Just be you. If you try to be somebody else, you will have difficulties to stay constant and you will find it hard to write articles every day/week.
5. Don't associate every post you write with all the categories you defined
Normaly a blogger should blog on one specific subject, so his categories should be very specific. If you can associate more than 2 categories everytime you write a post, think about how you defined your categories; maybe you can delete some of them.
There's 2 reasons for that. The first is if you associate many categories, your post may not be very targeted/specific, making it not really valuable because it is too general. The second reason is because when someone browses your blog, clicking on each different categories, he always see the same posts so he will probably leave your blog because he thinks he already read all your posts.
Some people don't really know the distinction between categories and tags. You can add as many tags as you want to your articles, but don't do the same thing for categories.
Building Blog Links: Submitting to Blog Directories
When you want to attract more people on your website, you have to create link. There is a lot of ways, like adding your website URL on every signature you have on the internet, with which you post comments on blogs and post on forums.
If the website you want to promote is a blog, you can submit its URL to blog directories. It is one of the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique you can use because these sites have a lot of traffic. Social sites, blogs and forums are becoming more and more popular as the web 2.0 gains popularity.
Here are some of the most popular blog directories, so visit them and link your blog on it :
Technorati : http://www.technorati.com/
Blogcatalog : http://www.blogcatalog.com/
MyBlogLog : http://www.mybloglog.com/
Bloghop : http://www.bloghop.com/
Best of The Wb Blog Search : http://blogs.botw.org/
Blitzfind : http://www.blitzfind.net/
Bloggernity : http://www.bloggernity.com/
2RSS : http://www.2rss.com/
Blogsrater : http://www.blogsrater.com/
TopWebBlogs : http://www.topwebblogs.com/
Blogtoplist : http://www.blogtoplist.com/
Blogstreet : http://www.blogstreet.com/
Umm Yeah : http://ummyeah.com/
Blogarama : http://www.blogarama.com/
TopBlogArea : http://www.topblogarea.com/
Blogged : http://www.blogged.com/
Feedster : http://www.feedster.com/
Bloglines : http://www.bloglines.com/
Blogsearchengine : http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
Search4Blogs : http://www.search4blogs.com/
BlogPulse : http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
5starblogs : http://www.5starblogs.com/
Addyourblog : http://www.addyourblog.com/submit.php
Blogcode : http://www.blogcode.com/signup.php
Blogexplosion : http://www.blogexplosion.com/directory/
Blogwise : http://www.blogwise.com/
Blogbunch : http://www.blogbunch.com/suggest/
TopRankBlog : http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/
Blog-search : http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
NewsGator : http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/Folksonomy.aspx
RSSFeedsDirectory : http://www.blogger.com/http://rss-feeds-directory.com/directory/
Blogflux : http://dir.blogflux.com/
BOTW Blogs : http://blogs.botw.org/
Blog Directory : http://www.blog-directory.org/
Blogoozle : http://www.blogoozle.com/
Blogapedia : http://www.bloggapedia.com/