I wrote the first part of this series about a month ago, and it’s taken me awhile to get back on topic. November has been a busy month for some of my other business ventures.

The rest of the series can be found here:

1. Set Goals or Die! Part 1: Posting Frequency Goals…
2. Set Goals or Die! Part 2: Traffic Building Goals..
3. Set Goals or Die! Part 3: Monetization Goals…(forthcoming).

I’ve been doing a lot of ppc campaigns, as well as some blackhat techniques(shhhhh)…

In the first part of this series I spoke about setting and keeping a daily posting schedule of at least 1 post per day, but 3 is an ideal number. If you can post religiously 3 posts per day, your blog will be at the top of your niche in just a matter of months.

Today I’m going to talk about traffic building. Traffic is also paramount to a good successful blog. In fact traffic is the lifeblood. We include with traffic building – building followers or subscribers.

Here are a few steps on getting a lot more traffic.

1. Help people on forums. The more help you provide on forums like digital point, blackhatworld, or one specific to your niche, the more credibility you will build. Apply your link in the signature and you’re sure to get a lot of new visitors and blog subscribers.

2. Use google trends. I’ve spoken about this a lot. Google trends is a great way to get some immediate traffic. If you have some other good posts at the ready, people will stay a lot longer and might even subscribe. One thing I’ve done though that I’d actually advise against is using this exhaustively.

I posted a large amount of posts related to google trends, and got a lot of traffic – but it wasn’t the best quality because it didn’t always match my blog’s topic. Use this technique sparingly – but use it. I’d recommend posting 1 google trends blog post for every 5 normal blog posts.

3. Build backlinks. A great method I use for this is comment kahuna. This software finds blogs that remove do-follow and helps you write comments faster. One tip though: When writing comments try to find a post related to a post on your blog, then for your link back link to that post, not to the front page of your blog. This will build your google PR better, plus the people who visit your blog will be looking for similar information and will be more likely to subscribe.

4. Moniter your traffic. Part of setting goals is monitering what you’re doing and seeing if you’re making progress or not. I use statspress reloaded wordpress plugin, alexa, and google trends to track my traffic. I think it’s best to use multiple tools so you can get a more realistic picture.

5. Tweak. To be successful in blogging you will always be tweaking your efforts. Find what works for you. There will be some things that work for one specific niche that would never work for another. Just keep working and researching new ways to gain traffic.

6. Newsletter. To build stickyness and repeat traffic it is highly recommended that you give away an ebook, and build a newsletter with it. You can see an example with my newsletter form at the top of this blog.

7. Set little goals. The best way to build anything is to set mini goals. For instance set a goal of 1000 unique hits for December. Then set a goal for maybe 1500 for the next month. Do what you need to do in order to get those hits and you will be pleasantly surprised that you might get a lot more.

Bottom line: Don’t get discouraged, and never give up. You will succeed if you stick with it. Most big blogs began as small blogs. Also most big blogs took at least a year to build to big. It takes a lot of time and effort but in the end it is so worth it. It’s recession proof. I make money each month regardless of the financial woes of the nation or world. That’s job security.

Feel free to add any traffic tips you might have to this post and help others out.

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Is Do-follow in Comments Dead?

Image by shawnblog via Flickr

This is primarily heresay, and only the opinion of one blog – but they tend to have some highly informative articles.

I was reading a very interesting post from SEO 2.0 entitled “Commenting on DoFollow-blogs as a link building Strategy“.

The blog asks the question whether do-follow in comments matters anymore.

According to SEO 2.0 they say it doesn’t matter anymore. Apparently google is an intelligent beast, and knows whether a link is in the blog post, comments, sidebar, or footer.

Comments and footer are devalued largely, where as the link may appear on a PR 4 blog it might only provide a PR 2 or even PR 1 benefit.

So is it worth it to waste your time commenting for hours on end?

I think that link-building or gaming of google is dead.

At least traditional methods, I think the better way to get search engine traffic is via a combination of writing high trend posts via google trends, writing seasonal articles that will bring traffic year after year, and being sure to link out to other blogs to get pingbacks.

Content is still king – don’t waste time commenting – write, write, write.

I stick to my guns on this point. If you’re not writing a blog post now, you’re probably not making money. You should always be writing, or looking for something to write about.

The one factor that all the Rich bloggers share is they are always writing new content. They have over 1000 articles and counting. They keep content coming.

The best way to get ranked by the search engines is to be unique, and keep writing unique content.

Don’t give up, and don’t stop writing!

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Image by AJC1 via Flickr

The past few months I’ve been doing some big experimenting with bringing in new people to this blog. I’ve been focused big on writing for google trends, over writing real deep informative articles on social media, marketing, and making money.

I’m planning on making some changes to that in the upcoming weeks. I still plan on having at least 1-2 google trends related posts every day or so, but I will also have a lot more blog posts to help you – the reader.

One thing I have learned from this experiment is that if you can write posts that are related to happenings of the day, you will get a lot in search traffic.

I’m planning on adding some keyword related content for Thanksgiving, and the Holiday Season as well.

If you haven’t already subscribed to this blog – please do me a favor and subscribe now!

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Too many posts to handle? If you missed out on a great post from last week, here’s a quick digest of the top posts that you may want to check out:

Free Ebook: Ten Commandments of a Kickass Blog
Posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 in Announcements – Views: (228)

Join our Newsletter get “The Ten Commandments of a Kickass Blog” FREE!

I’m launching my newsletter this week. As a free gift to new subscribers we are giving our subscribers a FREE copy of my newest ebook entitled: “The ten commandments of a kickass Blog”.The book tells you the 1 thing that you must do above all else to become a successful blogger.I’ve gotten my blog up to 45,000+ hits per week, and this lays out what I’ve found is the number one, and possibly the only thing you need to do to be successful.

Sickening Racist Obama Jokes floating around the web…

Sickening Racist Obama Jokes floating around the web…
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (2732)

Just when you thought America has turned a proverbial leaf, it appears that some big Racist Obama Jokes are floating around.Come on people – aren’t we beyond our stupid petty differences?I mean heck, some people actually believe the guy is a muslim. Barack Obama is neither Arabic nor Muslim. But if he were – what would be wrong with that? Shouldn’t anyone be allowed to run for President in America despite their ethnic background, and their faith?
Shocking Negative Searches on Barack Obama in Google Trends…
Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (326)

I was taking a gander at Google trends, and am seeing some curious trends right now.There are many bigots apparently ‘afraid’ of an Obama presidency.FACT: Barack Obama is not, and never has been a Muslim. Anyone who says otherwise is Bearing False Witness and breaking a commandment – therefore must not be Christian.Fact: Obama is NOT the AntiChrist, there is no reference to this anywhere in the bible.

John Mccain Out of Touch – He thinks this is normal?
Posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (323)

I know this is a little late for election news, but John Mccain was talking about his mom, who wanted to go to France, so she went to France, she wanted to rent a car, but they wouldn’t let her because of her age..So she went and bought a car, so she could drive around France.Must be nice to just be able to drop a load of cash in a new car out of nowhere, instead of renting one.

The Top 3 Laws of Professional Blogging.
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Blogging – Views: (357) The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.Law #2 is write some more.Law #3 is never stop writing!I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Breaking Economic News: It Sucks. Break that! Sell Your Gold to Buy Christmas Gifts…
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 in Making Money Online – Views: (201)

I know the economy is bad right now, and it’s not getting better. Everyone keeps talking about it, companies are laying off left and right. The holiday season looks bleak.Well here’s a good way to make a little extra christmas cash. It’s simple, easy and doesn’t take any effort.The economy may be going down, but gold is going up. People are moving their investments from stocks to metals.If you need money to buy Christmas for your family, then selling your gold is a good option.

John Mccain’s Concession was an Eloquent end to a Tough Election…
Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 in Politics & Community News – Views: (185)

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The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.
Law #2 is write some more.
Law #3 is never stop writing!

I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.

The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.

Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Some common distractions that can ruin our blog:

• Twitter
• Re-designing
• Trying new ad networks
• Reading other people’s blogs.
• Thinking. Sometimes we try to hard to think up the perfect idea for a blog post, when it would be better to write 3 quick opinion pieces, or smaller articles
• Commenting on other sites. Yes this has a place, but again not as important as writing.

Get this in your head – if you’re not able to write 5 blog posts per day, there’s a good chance that you’ll never be a full-time blogger.

You’ll never be like John Chow, or Darren Rowse. They know how to keep quality content coming.

Sure it’s all been said before, I’m sure some of them have said the same thing many times.  For the person arriving from the search engines though, it’s only the first time.

If you don’t write, they won’t come. I worked so hard on so many things that just didn’t matter, and when I finally just decided to write as much as I can – my blog took off overnight.

Here are some ideas on types of posts you can write:

News Posts. Every blogger should make it a point of blogging about current events, even if you’re a niche and your blog is on pet grooming.

News posts are great and can bring a tidal wave of traffic. The best place to find news to report is google trends.

I talk about google trends a lot, If you don’t check google trends at least 1-2 times a day while writing, then stop reading my blog, and give up blogging.

Sure that’s harsh, but ya know it’s a tough world, and I’m not going to sugar coat this. You can be successful, or fail – your choice.

Regular on-topic Posts. These are the cream of the crop posts that you write. These have to be extremely tailored toward the topic of your blog. They need to be above and beyond, most news posts I work maybe 10 minutes on. Pillar Articles I work an hour or more on.

Series Posts. These can take a couple of days to write sometimes, but they are great for building sticky traffic.

Here’s another great idea for building your blog – tired of writing? Why not try adding some different media types. Why not record a video instead.

Video’s are great because you can upload them to a ton of different places, and will bring you a nice amount of traffic.

A nice tool which lets you upload your video to many different sites at once is tubemogul (it’s free) give it a shot!

Poll: Do you find yourself getting distracted when you should be writing? Also have you had similar results using Google Trends to bring in traffic?

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Image by jmtimages via Flickr

I was taking a gander at Google trends, and am seeing some curious trends right now.

There are many bigots apparently ‘afraid’ of an Obama presidency.

FACT: Barack Obama is not, and never has been a Muslim. Anyone who says otherwise is Bearing False Witness and breaking a commandment – therefore must not be Christian.

Fact: Obama is NOT the AntiChrist, there is no reference to this anywhere in the bible. A scripture I read once said “The Spirit of Contention is of the devil”, and the right wing is a lot more ‘Contentious’, does that make them anti-christs? Calling someone an Antichrist – especially the President-elect is not productive.

Both candidates are good men, and good leaders. Obama just came out ahead, I personally am glad of this decision.

Some odd trends and/or troubling trends from people who seem worried, or curious about our new President include:

Trend #26: “obama antichrist”
Trend #42: “Youngest President”
Trend #44: “First Black President”
Trend #54: “KKK Obama”
Trend #90: “How old is obama”

The troubling ones being the one about KKK – relating to KKK members calling for a race war if Obama was elected, and Obama Antichrist.

Of course there will be those, who have been blinded by the religious right, who are waking up, and realizing they don’t really know anything about this guy, or have no clue what they’re in for, and of course they’re nervous.

I just hope that America can put all of its differences aside, and give Barack Obama the chance he deserves to lead this country.

He did win with a mandate, and it could be the most electoral votes ever, it’s safe to say that if things don’t change over the next 4-8 years from what they are now, then they never will. It’s like night and day between yesterday, and today.

Yesterday it was a republican country, and today it is a democrats.

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Image via Wikipedia

Tonight John Mccain & David Cook were both on Saturday Night Live. (David Cook is a Singer from American Idol – in case ya didn’t know – I didn’t lol)…

Lookin’ for a topic to blog about, I head on over to Google Trends, and what did I find? “David Cook” #1, “Mccain SNL” #2. Which says to me that people care more about American Idol, than they do about who will be the next President. Of course there were two google trends listings for Mccain, the other being “Mccain Saturday Night Live” at #12. Can you add the two together and make Mccain come out ahead?

I dunno, that sounds fishy – like the way Mccain’s internal Pollsters called Mccain ‘functionally even’ with Obama. It just doesn’t fly…

UPDATE: I apologize regarding the American Idol comment(lots of impassioned comments) – my point to be made was that more people seem passionate about this David Cook, than there are for Mccain. Of course, I can see why after watchin’ on youtube.

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Pumpkin Carving and Successful Blogging?

Image via Wikipedia

First off it’s almost Halloween. I’ve love Halloween since I was a child age 6, and made my own haunted house at a friend’s house, albeit a simple, not as scary as planned haunted house.

In my imagination of course the haunted house was more scarier though, I guess when you’re six that’s all that really counts, right?

Pumpkin Carving is a hot topic right now, and I’m expecting it to be a very hot topic for the next few days, and of course fizzling out by the end of the day on Friday.

If you look at google trends there’s 2 mentions of pumpkin carving, 1 of pumpkin patterns, and 1 of how to cook pumpkin seeds.

A blog’s life-line is traffic. If you give readers what they want, you will get traffic in return. Again I can’t reiterate the power of google trends enough.

Today I wrote a blog post about the daylight savings time change, so far I’ve gotten 4,000 hits today just from people looking for information about daylight savings time. For those interested daylight savings schedule starts next sunday November 2nd.

If you’re here visiting for the first time – and you’ve come here looking for pumpkin carving information, don’t worry – I will be devoting the next few blog posts on the subject. Stay tuned, and if you want to help me out – subscribe to my blog, I would love ya forever.

With that said, keep an eye open for some good resourceful posts on pumpkin carving, how to cook pumpkin seeds, where to find the best pumpkin carving patterns, and maybe a few other halloween targeted articles.

One thought in closing – another great thing about seasonal trends, is that when you blog about pumpkin carving, you’re not only going to get a huge influx of visitors this Halloween season, but EVERY halloween season. In fact, if you provide enough good tips you may even be the first site they goto when the Halloween rolls around next year.

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Google Trends

Is Google trends the new linkbait?

There are sites popping up that create random text posts using keywords from google trends, and other sites of such, but when you view the listing in google it’s apparent that it’s a scam-site even before visiting.

I must say, blogging about Google trends topics is very smart. It’s obviously what people are searching for. I’m amazed at how much traffic I’ve gotten from google after using google trends – lets just say I went from 90% of my traffic coming from Twitter and other Social networks, as well as from subscribers of the blog, to now getting 75% coming from google, many of which decide to subscribe.

Now it used to be a great idea to come up with a really unique and popular pop culture post, that everbody links to. This would be called linkbait. It could be a list of things related to a specific topic as well. All that matters is that it’s widely popular, and spreads virally.

However writing linkbait, or trying to – is a hit or miss. Either your post becomes viral or it doesn’t. I’ve had a few posts go viral, but I must say that google trends is guaranteed.

You write a post on a google trends topic, and you will get traffic, and it’s very likely that you will also get linked.

Here are some tips to writing a good google trends article for maximum traffic:

1. The Number 1 trend isn’t always the best – sometimes the topic has peaked. If you click on the trend it will show you whether the item is going up or down.
2. Choose a topic that you’d like to talk about there are many to choose from, choose one that fits in well with your site.
3. Keyword saturation is key – you need to use the exact google trends phrase as often as possible, and insert at least 1-2 variations. For example today I posted about “Hummingbird Sex Position” I included the keyword phrase about six times, but also used the hummingbird sex technique, once throughout.
4. Always include related posts – you’ll get trackbacks that will help bring in more traffic.
5. Add a picture. You’ll also get traffic from google images.

Another great suggestion is to use a tool that helps me greatly, called Zemanta – it’s a firefox addon that suggests related images / blog posts, so that I don’t have to find them myself – it doesn’t always find related posts but it’s pretty good.

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Today is the first day of Fall 2008, Autumn is an exciting time for bloggers, the slow summer is finally over and we can all get back to business.

Fall / Autumn is my favorite time of year. I’m a halloween junky, and I also love to attend the Renaissance Festival here in ohio. I love the changing leaves, and the fresh apple cider at the local farms.

Fall has always been a time of relaxation to me. Even though my online endeavors and businesses are speeding up. There’s just something special about fall.

Fall 2008 will be the first year my wife experiences fall in Ohio. She’s from Utah, and sure they have trees, but she’s never seen the leaves change like they do here.

As fall 2008 approaches and the holiday season encroaches, now is the best time ever to build up your blog. Fall is when people come back from their vacations. Fall is also the beginning of the busy season for online professionals.

For political bloggers fall 2008 is extremely big being an election year. It’s about 6 weeks till election day. Have you made your decision yet? Will it be Mccain? Obama? Ron Paul? Other?

I of course back Obama, because I think he and Biden will do the most for our country, but a great place to get the low down from both sides of the fence is whitehouse2008.info.

Of course if you’ve been following my segments on Google trends, then you should be aware that Fall is the hot topic right now, and I highly recommend blogging about it.

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Hurricane Gustav which I picked up from google trends, as I’ve said for the past day or so has been a great keyword, and my site’s not even about weather related topics.

Jamie Meredith from OurBlogThing, asked to see some more detailed stats and perhaps some graphs, so here’s some of my stats from Google Analytics, this is really just the first few pages… as it has the most frequent traffic stats for the past few days since I started this experiment. The image is at the very bottom of this post – just click on it to make it bigger- as you can see from the pic, I did pretty well, without really exerting a lot of effort, it’s not like I wrote a 10 page article on hurricane gustav, it might’ve been 3 paragraphs.

“hurricane gustav track” 65 hits
“gustav track” 43 hits
“vancouver earthquake” 37 hits
“tropical storm hanna” 25 hits
“tropical storm hannah” 21 hits
“hurricane hannah 2008″ 19 hits
“mackenzie phillips” 15 hits
“hannah hurricane” 14 hits
“hurricane gustav” 12 hits
“hurricane gustav latest update” 11 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 11 hits
“latest gustav track” 6 hits
“latest on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“updates on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“hanna hurricane” 5 hits
“hurricane hannah” 5 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 5 hits
“latest updates on gustav” 5 hits
“gustav latest track” 4 hits
“track hurricane gustav” 4 hits
“hurricane gustav latest” 3 hits
“hurricane gustav latest updates” 3 hits
“latest updates of gustav” 3 hits
“storm hannah” 3 hits
“vancouver earthquake august 2008″ 3 hits
“hanna hurricane 2008″ 2 hits
“hanna+hurricane” 2 hits
“latest info on hurricane gustav” 2 hits.

“Hurricane Gustav” = 118 Hits total

“Hurricane Hannah” = 96 hits total

“Vancouver Earthquake” = 40 hits

“mackenzie phillips” = 15 hits

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Image via Wikipedia

The past few days I’ve been experimenting with google trends.

Google trends are hot topics of the moment. I wrote one tiny post using the keyword phrase Hurricane Gustav track, and have gotten about 500 hits in two days.

Not too shabby, I can always use more traffic, and I have impression based advertisers who pay me for each view of my website, which is nice.

I was quite amazed at this technique myself, as I never expected it to be this valuable.

The more amazing thing is the fact that I was also able to round up about 35 new subscribers overnight. I didn’t think the traffic would be that sticky but apparently I’ve got myself some new readers.

I’m definitely going to be using google trends more and more to bring in more quality traffic, and keep you posted on the outcome.

One note- Hurricane gustav is still bringing in a lot of traffic, my advice would be to write a blog post about Hurricane Gustav track, and see how much traffic you get from it.

On a side note -I do feel bad for those in the path of Hurricane Gustav, and making money off a hurricane isn’t that great, but they’re used to hurricanes and if I went through something like Hurricane Katrina, there’s no way I’d move back to the gulf coast region. My thoughts and prayers are definitely with the people down there.

Lets hope Hurricane Gustav proves to be a let down as far as hurricanes go..

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Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Using google trends to increase traffic…

Using google trends is pretty easy and straight forward, it’s also a great way to find new niches for new blogs and topic web sites.

1. First thing you want to do is go to google trends.
2. Next you’re gonna want to click on ‘More Hot Trends’ on the bottom right. This will give you a huge list of 100 hot trends.
3. Next you’re going to want to choose which trends to blog about, I think it may be best to only pick no more than 5, 2-3 per day should be good enough.
4. You can click on each trend to bring up a side by side google and google blog search on the topic, you can go to the blogs and just rephrase what they say, don’t copy and it’s best if you use more than one source.
5. When writing your post make sure you use the exact trend phrase that they give on the trends page. This is the keyword that you will want to get ranked for. You want to use it in your title, in a heading(h2 or h1) and at lease 4-5 times in the body of your blog post.
6. Be sure to link out to other blogs on the same topic, as you will get pingbacks and that will increase your rank.
7. A good tool I use to help me when blogging is called Zemanta and it makes it easy as pie to include related articles, and images.
8. On posts that you make on google trends that aren’t related to your blog, be sure to put up a disclaimer explaining what your blog really is about and giving people a method to subscribe easily – this is a good way to build future traffic to your blog, I’m sure many who visit will share some of the same interests that you do and will be interested in hearing more about them…
9. Don’t over do things, don’t do this everday, and don’t make it the only thing you do…This is a nice way to bring in some fresh traffic and increase your money however it’s not a great way to run a successful blog – use it sparingly and just as a tool in your arsenal, for example I’m planning on doing it one day per week, starting next week. I will keep posting updates on my successes and failures using this tip.

Follow these easy tips and I’m sure you’ll be successful using Google Trends to bring in more traffic.

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Google Trends update:

Yesterday I mentioned delving into google trends as a way to bring new traffic.

Yesterday I wrote a post about Mackenzie Phillips, Del  Martin Dieing, and Hurricane Gustav track. Each of these topics were at that point in the top 5 google trends.

I know I planned to write 25 posts on google trends topics, however I had some errands to run offline and was unable to get back on – don’t worry I’ll be doing a lot more of these.

I found out that it’s a very wise thing to do, in fact I’m thinking about instituting a trendy wednesday. Every wednesday I’ll focus my efforts on google trends topics.

The results have been astounding – I got 131 hits to one blog post on hurricane gustav. All these hits were either from google search or google blog search, which definitely proves that the point is valid, perhaps if I’d worked on a longer post with more mentions of hurricane gustav I would’ve ranked even higher.

At any case this does prove something pretty remarkable, and that I’m going to be delving a lot deeper into, over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for further updates on google trends.

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I just read of a study on getting traffic from google trends, and thought I need to get in on some of this action, so here’s what I’m going to do in my first experiment. I’m going to write 1 blog post each on the top 25 topics of the day.

Tomorrow I will check back and let you know what I’ve received in teh way of traffic. These won’t be extremely deep posts, just small ones with the intent to build keyword density.

Wish me luck on this experiment.

My list of trends to blog about:

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