Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that’s easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route. - Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution). - Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind First and foremost, you’re writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target “searched for” terms. - Participate at Related Forums & Blogs Whatever industry or niche you’re in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that’s already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two Follow

One of the interesting new features that online distribution (and activation) of games bring to players is the ability to fully test a retail game before buying it. By having access to the full game, the player can not only test its complete feature set, but also have contact with the same online community he’d meet when purchasing it. The catch, however, is that the player is only allowed to play the game for a certain number of days - the test version ceases to work after the trial date has passed. From what I know, Steam was the first major distribution channel that tried something like this, and now, making certain games available for free during a few days is becoming increasingly usual on that system. What impact does the free trial period have on the online presence of certain games? Valve’s World War 2 game Day of Defeat:Source has already been through two such trials, and here’s how it has worked for them. Day of Defeat:Source was the new version of Day of Defeat, a popular Half-life 1 mod. The difference was that DoD:S was a retail version that must be bought, and even though it’s still technically a Half-life 2 mod, it’s considered a full game on practice. The initial release was pretty good and the game managed to gather good attention, even though the player base did suffer some major (and uncommon) drop over the following month. On February 2006, the game saw its first free weekend. Still something a bit new, the initial reaction was good, and the game managed to achieve online popularity for a while, going back to the amount of online players it had reached on release. It’s hard to determine how much of that actually turned out to be from new sales - it could be that many players that had already bought the game decided to go back playing it because of the sudden increase in the number of online players - but the game managed to get an actual increase of 40% in its online presence, so apparently this small free weekend did work pretty fine for them. On July 2006 they did another free weekend, and while the residual increase in online presence wasn’t as good as the previous one - around 15% at best, I’d say - they did manage to top their previous records of average number of players online. Judging by the graphs, having free weekends seem to have worked for them as small steps toward increasing the number of online players; apart from the free trials, the game’s online Follow