SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 - Microsoft Corp. said today it has agreed to acquire Tokyo based Sanrio Co., Ltd. (President & CEO: Shintaro Tsuji) including all rights to the famous Sanrio branded character Hello Kitty(R).

…In the late 1990s, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered Shintaro Tsuji $5.6 billion for the rights to Hello Kitty.

of course it’s an April Fools Joke from here..

I was just providing a little primer on the basics of blog promotion a little while ago when Rich Tatum commented on it and provided me a link to his far more comprehensive blogging promotion guide. Some of them aren’t exactly “rule guides” though. I wouldn’t blog about Sex or be Extreme just because I’d want to get traffic, it’s a double edged sword, just check out Xiaxue’s blog for something in that direction!
Ultimately you need to ask yourself the question “why do you blog?”. Have your voice be heard, share your opinions, but obviously share it with those who you think can contribute BACK to you. Not everyone needs to be a blog superstar!

Other things I would also add is to promote activity via other social media sites, and link them back to your mainblog. So instead of uploading your pictures on Snapfish, you upload them on something like Flickr where you have another way of finding more like minded people (on like minded visual topics for instance…).

Once you make a blog posting you may find that even though you have excellent content, nobody can find it! With millions of blogs out there, that’s hardly a surprise.

Here are a few tips and suggestions on promoting your blog…
1. Join technorati and claim your blog. Also, be sure to add an avatar to your blog, that way you will stand out. People use Technorati to search for blog content.
2. Join Feedburner, this not only gives you interesting tracking stats for your blog but also auto alerts other blog search services everytime you make an update.

3. Use your actual URL in Sanriotown when you join, eg. my blog URL is blog.hellokitty.com/ypsilonsiu but Feedburner and Technorati won’t recognize these, it recognizes only the actual URL it’s redirected to, in my case that’s http://blog.sanriotown.com/ypsilonsiu:hellokitty.com/

4. Once you’ve posted your blog, have it pinged using a service like http://www.pingoat.com/ or http://pingomatic.com/ or http://pinger.blogflux.com/. Just enter your blog URL and sometimes a brief description and it will ping/notify that your blog has been updated to a variety of blog search indexes.

5. Update regularly and cross link regularly with the blogroll option. Get people to link to you and reverse.

6. Finally, the most obvious (but often forgotten one) TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY ABOUT IT!

There are some more detailed sources that discuss how to make a better or more prominent blog here and here.

Good luck, let your voice be heard!

If you haven’t actually been following the news, check out the most recent news of the Hello Kitty Valentine MTR wedding, a crazy wedding taking place in Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway…

For more on this, click here