A good blog can bring you so many benefits, but that leads to the question:

What makes a blog "good?"

Obviously the content has a big part to do with it, but so many blogs with great content are never even browsed. Allow me to help with that!

Have a real "About Me" page

Blogging best practicesThis is my biggest pet peeve with bloggers. While I hate when people don't have an "About Me" page at all, I don't think anything makes me more mad than seeing the default filler page.

Today the Getty becomes an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. We've launched the Open Content Program to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty's digital resources as possible.

The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty's collections. Today we've taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum's collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.

These are high-resolution, reproduction-quality images with embedded metadata, some over 100 megabytes in size. You can browse all available images here, or look for individual "download" links on the Getty Museum's collection pages. As part of the download, we'll ask for a very brief description of how you're planning to use the image. We hope to learn that the images will serve a broad range of needs and projects.

Are you ensuring that your blog content gets the attention it deserves? Once you publish relevant, engaging and information-rich blog content, you need to maximize its social exposure and content-promotion-best-practiceshelp it reach a wider captive audience. High rates of social content curation are critical to SEO. When your content is shared on social media, its reach is amplified—leading to more website traffic and lead generation and enhanced SEO. Blog promotion is critical; it can help you attain status an industry thought leader, increase lead generation and conversion, and land more new business.

To ramp up the ROI of content marketing, maximize the reach of your company blog. Make your content easy to discover. You want prospects to find your content, when they are actively searching online, performing research and ready to make a buying decision. Here are eight key areas of focus and valuable resources to amplify the reach of your content.

LinkedIn is the largest and most influential professional network in the world with approximately 225 million users. The social network is great for making new connections, staying in the knowLinkedIn-maketing-social-media about industry news and trends, sharing content, building and maintaining a following, and amplifying brand reach and visibility. LinkedIn has an outstanding visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74%, which is approximately three times higher than the conversion rates of Facebook and Twitter. The most common and detrimental mistake brands make on LinkedIn is creating overly "salesy" marketing. LinkedIn is a social network, so be social; set your sights on being an informational resource and providing links to highly shareable content jam-packed with deep industry insight and valuable solutions.

Facebook plans to test a new payments product that would allow online shoppers to make purchases on mobile apps using their Facebook login information, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.

The product, sources said, would allow any shopper who has previously provided Facebook with their credit card details to make purchases on partnering e-commerce mobile apps without entering billing information.

Facebook confirmed the test, which is expected to launch in the next month or so, to AllThingsD.

Thrillist-owned JackThreads, a flash-sale shopping site for young men, is the pilot partner. The company has a strong relationship with Facebook, sees a good chunk of revenue come through mobile phone purchases and may also have a decent demographic overlap with one particular segment of Facebook users — gamers — who would have provided the social network with credit card information. It will be interesting to see if Fab, another close partner of Facebook's that does well on mobile devices, will follow suit.