Cash from email trash

Fred Black over at Problogger.com had a great post today about the troubles bloggers who use advertising face when trying to balance product reviews, having a life, and bringing in more advertising revenue for their blogs. This got me thinking about ways that any blogger on any platform can build relationships with potential advertisers and still get away from their email once in a while.

I can sum it up in five words: Auto responders are your friends. Most email platforms come with an autoresponder/vacation message service. And most of us have multiple emails. Create multiple emails and use them to field different inquiries and share information. Especially if you host your domain. It takes only a few minutes to set up email addresses for accepting product review inquiries, advertising inquiries, and general information requests. Each of these addresses can have an auto response text set up within their settings on the email platform. You can also add links to pages on your blog that explain the details of how you handle requests for product reviews, sales, advertising, etc.

Going into the nitty gritty details of how to do this is beyond the scope of this blog, since it is slightly different for each email program or client. You will usually find the auto responder in the settings of your email account. Set up auto responses and even filters if you prefer and soon you will have an easier time of managing your email responses and hopefully making more trips to the bank from all the new advertisers you have connected with.

Blinged out Blogger blogrolls

We've all been waiting and hoping for a while now and finally we have a real blogroll widget for Blogger. The actual uses of the blogroll tool go way beyond basic text links. Anything that can be a feed can be added to the blogroll, along with a nice little icon that helps identify whether it is a typepad blog, a Blogger blog, an rss feed ... you get the picture.

Want to link to your twitter feed in style? Check. Flickr stream? Yep, that too. This is a huge step forward in functionality.

The Blogger folks took the time to put together a nice demo feed on how to use the new blogroll widget. You can find it here