Greetings and Salutations!

Pop by the Editor Forum! I just posted a fresh list for February 2011 of free books I'm mailing out to editors! I've added a bunch of new books into that listing. The list is now open to include any books you want to review for any site in the BellaOnline network. That is, if you write the Low Carb site but want to take on a fishing book, as long as the Fishing editor agrees to have you guest-post your review on her site, that's fine!

We also have our list of empty sites here -

http://www.bellaonline.com/misc/joinus/join_topics.asp

So those are always available for guest articles.

Please swing by the Editor Forum and take a look. Then EMAIL ME with your choices! Please make sure you EMAIL ME and don't use any other system of contacting me. I need everything in email, in one folder, so that I can sort it by date and fairly know who asked for a given book first. Thanks!!


COUNTRY-RELATED TOPICS

I want to thank everyone for chiming in on our discussion about how to better organize all of our country-related topics! I received many great, insightful comments on the topic. The issue is that we currently have our country topics (like Mexico, Australia, Japan, China, etc.) sort of "randomly" distributed between our Society & Culture channel and our Travel & Leisure channel. There's no real rhyme or reason how sites ended up in one spot or the other. This makes it confusing for our visitors (and heck our editors!) to know where to look for a given country.

The overwhelming consensus was that we should have all countries together in one spot. The only real discussion was what we should call this new location. We want to use words that are crystal clear to our visitors.

The most commonly requested new area name was "Travel & Culture". That way we make clear that we offer information to people who want to go somewhere to visit, and also for people who want to learn more about a location without visiting it. These areas overlap almost completely of course :) Hopefully someone visiting a location wants to learn more about its culture first, and hopefully someone reading about a location wants to know about the reasons it's worthy to visit there.

I will be working on this update over the weekend. This requires NO EFFORT AT ALL on the part of editors!! Your site has the same name, the same URL, everything is exactly the same. The one and only thing that will change is how the channel page shows entries. The channel page gets little traffic - most visitors to sites go directly there from a search engine, directly to a given article. That is, visitors usually don't meander aimlessly around our site saying "Jeez, I wonder what countries I can learn about today." It's much more likely they are on Google saying "Hey I just got a Mexican obsidian necklace from my boyfriend, i wonder what this stuff is." They google it and find our Mexican article on the topic, and browse from there.

I'll let you know when the updates are all done, and we can test and see how it works!

Thanks everyone :) And of course as always, feel free to email me with any questions!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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