Publisha has got some very exciting news that we can finally make public today!

We’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of Publisha users over the last year, and we’ve consistently heard that most of you find it easy to write articles, but difficult to promote your site and gain readership. So we thought we’d launch a sister site that takes a different approach! This time you just focus on the writing, and we’ll do the rest! (Seeing as this is a crowd-sourced community effort, any promotion that you can do will really help us to grow the site quickly.) 

ViewsHound is going live on May 2nd, but you can sign up right now and get busy. Here’s the low-down, and why we think you’re going to love it:

ViewsHound is the first crowd-sourced news site to offer daily prizes for the best articles, photographs and cartoons. The site will focus on opinion and comment pieces and contributors are invited to compete for a daily prize fund of $120.

We’ve also got a pre-launch prize fund of $1,000, made up of one $500 top prize and 10 prizes of $50 each for material contributed before May 2nd. You can sign up right now to compete to win one of these pre-launch prizes.

The site will have major sections covering politics, business, travel, sport, technology, art and culture, and will be promoted heavily to build a large and active reader base.

Whether you win a cash prize or not, everyone who contributes can link their articles back to their blog and benefit from ViewsHound’s traffic. We hope that many journalistic careers can be launched and sustained by ViewsHound.

Anyone is welcome to submit material for consideration. We use human editors, plagiarism checkers and other filters to make sure that everything published is original and of high quality. Right from the start we want ViewsHound to be about quality content that people want to read, and will carefully choose the material that makes it onto the site.

The ViewsHound website is at www.viewshound.com and the ViewsHound Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/viewshound. If you want to help us spread the word, become a ViewsHound fan on Facebook.

It's always nice to get fan mail from our users, and even better when the user has gone to the trouble of recording a video!

So here's video blogger Kelsie Morales telling us why she uses Publisha. You can see her Publisha site at www.kelsiemorales.com.

The iPhone and iPad have ceased to become novelties, and are now mainstream devices worthy of special attention by all serious bloggers and digital publishers.

With over 90m iPhones and over 15m iPads sold, the devices are proving their worth in delivering content to readers who are often upmarket and influential.

A modern app needs three things in order to be successful. First and foremost, it needs to provide readers with content that is worth reading. That’s one of the things in publishing that will never change, no matter what technology we use: know your audience and serve them well. Second, information needs to be in a format that is easy to read and easy to navigate. And third, it must be easy for the publisher to create and update content.

Once you’ve got those basics right, you can really begin to use the power of these new mobile devices to maximise your readership. Reading on the move is totally different to sitting at a computer: people want different types of content to dip into when they have a few minutes to spare. This is good news for publishers, whose content must compete for attention with that of other media providers. The thing that all successful publishers need is the attention of their readers, and iPhone and iPad apps give readers more time in the day when they can be paying attention to digital content.

Publisha's platform gives bloggers and digital publishers a presence on web, Facebook, iPhone and iPad, all from a single integrated dashboard. Publisha users are finding that if you give readers more ways to consume your content, they will consume more, and that’s what gives modern publishers an edge.

Publisha is currently offering free accounts at www.publisha.com on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you're going to start a blog, or want to plan a blog, here's a useful 13 step blog planning worksheet.

If you think about these questions while you're planning your corporate blog or personal blog you'll keep your writing on-track. Good planning is the first step to success, so here's what you need to consider. 

SECTION 1: THE BASICS

Q1. Audience: Who is your intended audience? In other words, who is your blog aimed at?

Q2. Purpose: Why will people read your blog? Examples include: for information, for entertainment, for relaxation, learning “How-To”.

Q3. Tone: What style of writing do you want? Examples include: formal, relaxed, conversational.

SECTION 2: TOPICS AND CATEGORIES    

Q4. Topics: What general topic areas do you want to write about?

Q5. Categories: What categories will you divide your articles into?

Q6. The yawn test: Why will your readers care about each category you've chosen? If you're struggling to think of a reason, ditch it!

Q7. Types of media: What media do you wish to use? Examples include text, images, video, audio.

SECTION 3: IDEAS FOR ARTICLES

Q8. Sites to watch: Which sites are you going to regularly scan in order to get ideas for articles?

Q9. Life experiences: Which experiences in your day-to-day life are you going to use as a source of ideas for articles?

SECTION 4: GETTING IT WRITTEN

Q10. Frequency: How often do you want to add a new article? (Once or twice a week is a good starting point).

Q11. Authors: Who is going to write your articles? Will you do this yourself, invite other contributors (free of charge), or pay people to write?

SECTION 5: PROMOTION

Q12. Announcing new articles: Where will you announce new articles? Publisha automatically posts to your Facebook wall and Twitter feed. Consider other specialist news sources, such as putting technical articles on Hacker News, and general sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg.

SECTION 6: TRACKING AND IMPROVEMENT

Q13. Tracking: How will you see which articles are most popular, and decide which direction to take your blog in future? Publisha has built-in analytics, and you can easily link Google Analytics. These are likely to be your best choices.

Facebook has launched a service that allows businesses to offer users deep discounts through its smartphone application.

Users physically out shopping who "check in" to the Facebook Places programme via their mobile smartphone will be presented with an offer they can redeem immediately in the store.

Businesses will be able to use a self-service interface to create their own deals and publish them on Facebook, a feature that will eliminate the need for a sales force to sign up businesses. Facebook does not take a cut from the deals.

Read more here: http://yhoo.it/aCgIVN