Another cartoon created by creative genius  Matthew Schmoll. 
If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

It’s Friday, so we all know what that means! It’s time to take a tour around the blogosphere and discover what interesting posts have been put up this week. I tried to include a little something for everyone here, so I hope you enjoy it.

First up, we have Stephen Fung who is currently in Macau, recovering from his adventures at Computex in Taipei. Before he left Taiwan, however, he did not forget to get lots of pictures of booth babes at the popular tech trade show and he was nice enough to share them all with us. He almost forgot to blog about them, but thankfully, he managed to erect a gallery for our viewing pleasure. No pun intended.

Spud Oregon from Nice4Rice is a pretty crazy kook. I don’t know how I missed this post earlier this month, but the saying holds true: better safe than sorry. He explores different paid post opportunities and then ultimately offers a contest to win an empty juice box. C’mon, you know you want it.

Perennial root of all evil John Chow reminds us that WordPress 2.2.1 is now available for download. This build of the popular blogging platform provides a series of tweaks, bug fixes, and alterations. Improvement and progress are good things, don’t cha know?

Kelly Cho of Catch a Falling Star went for a trip through Beijing where she found some food that she considers to be freaking gross. Yes, they’re still alive and yes, they’re on skewers. You have to see it to believe it.

Derrich offers a teary-eyed farewell to the legendary Bob Barker. Barker was the host of The Price is Right — voted the greatest game show of all time — for an amazing 35 years. In case you missed the final episode, Derrich hunted down a couple of clips. Can you say Plinko?

Today it seems that every blog you visit is running a contest. This new trend allows blogs to engage their users to preform an action to enter into the contest. Contests create a buzz about your blog and if you have not done one you may want to consider it.

Michael posted last month on why you should have a blog contest. What was missing from that is how to promote your contest.

There are 3 types of sites to market your contest too. Each have their own specific type of traffic and users.

Blog Contest Sites
These sites are blogs setup to blog about contests running in the blog sphere. Two that I found so far are Contest Blogger and The Link Bait. The users from these blogs will be expert bloggers who are Internet savvy.

Contest Sites
If you are looking for some free traffic for your blog then post to some of the contests sites. Some of these sites require a link back of some kind or a payment but they can send you a lot of traffic so it could be worth it. A few sites that I suggest are Contest Hound and Online-Sweepstakes.com. These users are not all Internet savvy and from our own experience were not able to follow the contest instructions.

Large Blog Communities
One way to get a large amount of traffic is to partner with a large blog community to co-sponsor the event. This works well with blog communities that have 5,000 or more visitors a month. I suggest contacting the owner of these blogs to see if they are open to doing a co-sponsor contest and wait for a response. Depending on the community I would expect most of these users to e expert bloggers who are Internet savvy as well.

I hope the next time you run a contest these suggests will help you out.

Is there anything you have tried that works well for contests?

Marketing and advertising is a tricky business, because what might work for one organization, for one product, at one particular period in time may not work for another. There are far too many variables involved, so there are never any hard and fast rules when it comes to promoting your product or service. That said, there are a few guidelines that you should bear in mind.

For example, when you’re offering a web hosting service, it is important to try and capture every segment of the market by providing a wide range of services. On the one hand, you want a cheap and easy-to-use plan that new webmasters can afford and understand. This way, they don’t have to fumble through complicated coding and terminology that they may not completely understand. On the other hand, you want more advanced plans with impressive feature sets for established web professionals. They may have particular compatibility requests, a need for a certain number of databases, and so on. Reliability and functionality are more important, in this respect, than pricing. And then you have to address everyone in between these two polarities.

Put yourself in your target demographic and consider what you would want if you were a customer. This applies to everything from clothing to electronics, freelance writing to a dry cleaning service. And don’t forget to offer exceptional customer service, but people will always value that over slightly lower pricing.

When I asked people to let me know your businesses to suggest a niche I didn’t think I would get such a hard one to start.

Karen from nanaimohypnosis.com said she is currently looking for a way to niche with online hypnosis. I did a search and there is already a lot of people doing this for pain management, weight loss and stop smoking.

One thing that came to mind was something for kids with ADHD. I would create a small hypnosis program (book/cd/dvd/online game) that could be run by parents with their kids online for short periods of time that grow in length with each session. I would set the program up as a recurring payment business where they join as members and have access to the program, support forum and do a weekly conference coaching session for the parents.

Now I haven’t done any real research into the success of this or how many kids have ADHD but it is a relatively new topic in the hypnotherapy realm and one that if you were to start to niche today, you would be considered an expert in the area.

How would you niche in this type of business?

Do you have a business and want an idea on how you could niche it? Post your business type and what your business is in the comments and I will feature your business in a follow up.

When you set up your blog, one of the first things that you’ll consider is what exactly you’ll write about. You worry about the quality of your content and your ability to lure in new readers. At the same time, it’s important to remember that the discussion has to be a two-way street; this is the only way that you can grow and improve your blog. Sure, getting lots of comments on your posts is a great thing, but what if someone wants to contact you directly? This issue is particularly important if an advertiser wants to work out a private sale with you, or in the case of a business blog, if a customer wants to get more information about your product or service.

I’ve been using the WP-Contact Form plug-in for quite some time and it really does make the creation of a contact form a whole lot easier than trying to code it yourself. Some people just post up their email addresses, but that just sets you up for a whole lot of nasty spam… and no one wants that. Instead, with a contact form, your actual email address remains hidden from the general public. At the same time, you are just as accessible.

To limit the amount of spam, there is even an option to toss in a security question before someone can submit a message to you. This is very effective at stopping the bots.

Keep in contact with your readers. Get a contact form.