I just signed a contract with a major publisher to write a book titled ?My Year in the Blogosphere: Confessions of a Blogging Skeptic? — and I?m hoping you can help me with it.

In particular, I?m looking for examples of businesses — OTHER than ad-supported blogs, blogging consultants, marketing consultants, and PR firms — who are using blogs successfully as a marketing tool.

If you can show that the blog is actually selling product and making money for the business, so much the better.

But I?m most interested in evidence that blogging is a worthwhile marketing activity and should be proactively pursued by businesses looking to promote their products and services.

Does a citizen have the right to expect that certain basics be provided to him, such as health care, housing — and a job?

For many professionals, technology and obsolescence are increasingly robbing them of the opportunity to earn a living in their area of specialty. And no where is this more prevalent then in computers, once viewed as the most stable and fastest growing career in the U.S.

According to an article in InformationWeek (4/4/05), the Gartner Group reports that 30% of high-tech jobs in the United States are at risk from outsourcing to India and other nations.

?I?m just finishing my MIS degree, and when I see articles like this, it just makes me ask, what?s the point of getting an education if everything my family and I sacrified to get this degree is meaningless?? asks Bob Walz in a letter to the editor in InformationWeek.

My heart goes out to Bob. On the other hand, do companies have an obligation to provide Bob and other workers with well-paying employment? If a company can get IT services like Bob?s at a fraction of the cost by outsourcing to a programmer in India, don’t they have an obligation to their shareholders to do it?

Your thoughts?

Laypeople who look down on marketing ? especially long-copy, hard-sell direct marketing like e-book microsites ? say, ?If your product was any good, you wouldn?t have to promote it with such hype.?

Doctors, attorneys, and other professionals have traditionally held that point of view, along with many others.

Nice to think so, but na?ve. Sad to say, it doesn?t work that way in the real world.

?The expression ?If you build it, they will come? is not true,? said Steve Murphy, CEO, Rodale Inc., in an interview with Fast Company (3/05).

?We had lots of great properties at Rodale, but not enough of them were known. We needed to expose them to the mass market.?

Does your product or service ?sell itself?? Or do even good products need great marketing?

At first glance, Richard Kirshenbaum ? co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners ? is not my kind of guy.

He dresses too cool, has long hair, and runs a trendy NYC ad agency focusing on branding. Yuch!

So I was pleasantly surprised when, in an interview with Psychology Today (4/05, p. 34), he had this to day about humor in advertising:

?Humorous ads are troubling because you have to create a link to the product and its benefit. Often, people remember a funny ad but they don?t remember the product.?

I now have a growing admiration for Richard, and think his assessment is spot on ? really clever or funny ads become memorable as ads, but often do squat for product sales.

What do you think?

In a ?Views? column in DM News (4/25/05. p. 32), George Le Pera makes the case that long sales letters are better than short sales letters.

Accoding to Le Pera, who is creative director at Chinnici Direct (New York, NY), long letters cement relationships, strengthen brands, stand out in the mailbox ? and get read.

Being a freelance copywriter who specializes in writing long sales letters, I want to agree with George.

But I don?t think that a long letter is always better than a short letter in every situation.

Your thoughts?

If you publish an e-zine like I do (my Direct Response Letter), and your subscriber list is fairly large (mine is 55,000), you will be inundated with e-mail correspondence from e-book publishers — and other online marketers — asking you to promote their product to your list on an ?affiliate basis.?

In the affiliate arrangement, you ? the e-zine owner — get a commission on every sale generated by the promotion to your list, typically ranging from 25% to 50% of the product price.

The product can be promoted in a solo e-mail marketing message to the e-zine subscriber list or an online ad in the e-zine itself ? or both.

My question is this: is the e-zine publisher obligated to disclose to the reader that he is an affiliate for the product and will receive a cut of the sale? (I should mention that the overwhelming majority of affiliate promotions I receive as a consumer make no mention of this.)

The song ?I Am? by Train has this line: ?I never had a day where money didn?t get in my way.?

Is money a problem for you?

Numerous surveys show that couples fight about money more than anything else, with the possible exceptions of division of household labor, parenting, and sex.

I am in the middle of the road as far as money is concerned: I like money and it is important to me, but I am not obsessed with it.

Here are 5 money tips that have worked for me; they may or may not work for you:

1. Do something in which you can make a higher than average income. A lot of white collar corporate guys my age (47) in my neighborhood (Bergen County, NJ) make around $100,000 a year. So I want to make at least double that. (I typically make at least 5 to 6 times that, but my goal is to double it.)

2. The best piece of financial advice for self-employed people I ever got was from Florida freelance writer David Kohn: ?Live below your means.? This was easy when I was single; having a wife who likes to spend money makes it more difficult.

3. Train yourself to enjoy feelings of affluence and wealth from having money rather than from having possessions. If you have to buy and own stuff to feel wealthy (the BMW), you will get caught in a vicious cycle of spending money as you make it ? and always needing more.

4. Have no consumer debt. I always pay cash for cars. I bought my first home with a mortgage because I had to. But the next house I bought for cash.

5. Avoid ?compare despair.? There will always be people richer and poorer than you. Unless you are Bill Gates, you will never be the richest kid on the block. So don?t get caught up in worrying about whether your neighbor has more than you.

In a recent issue of my e-zine, I quoted an article from Catalog Success that advised repeating keywords on your site as often as possible, and in multiple places, so search engine ?spiders? can find them.

Pretty standard advice. But as soon as he read my issue, copywriter Nick Usborne e-mailed me to let me know what he thought of the suggestion.

?This is the worst possible advice you can give to anyone about optimizing their site for the search engines,? says Nick.

?It’s an element of what is referred to as ?keyword stuffing? and is either ignored by the search engine algorithms or, in bad cases, your page and site will be penalized. Worse still, it results in pages that read very strangely to human visitors.?

What about you? Do you try to get your keywords into your Web copy frequently, as Catalog Success advises? Or, like Nick, do you use keywords sparingly?

And more important, have you measured results to see which approach works best?