Many of you have heard about or actually participate in blog carnivals. They are awesome. So I am posting a current carnival going on right now! It is on an excellent boomer blog The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur and this is the link to their current post. Enjoy!

Are you planning to look at blogs about the two Superbowl giants Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers this week? If yes, I thought you would enjoy looking at some popular blogs dedicated to the teams. So I have listed five (5) blogs for each team and the current post. Perhaps it may give you ideas about doing your own fan blog.

In addition, be sure to post comments to these sites.  Not only does your opinion count but it is what we baby boomer bloggers have in abundance. Right?  In addition, hit that like button on Facebook, Digg it, Tweet it and all the other good social bookmarket and social network things we can do. Enjoy the game this weekend.

5 Pittsburgh Steeler Blogs and Latest Post

1. Behind The Steel Curtain

Is Flozell Adams More of a Steeler Than He Ever Was a Cowboy?

2. DC Steeler Nation

Team Rallying Around Flozell, Of All People

3. Steelers Depot

Flozell Adams Monday Press Conference Transcript Quotes Superbowl XLV

4. Pittsburgh Steelers Fanatic

Why Even Steelers Fans Love Mike McCarthy

5. Steelers Today

Polamalu Named AP Defensive Player of the Year

5 Green Bay Packer Blogs

1.  Packers Gab

Playmate Jaime Edmondson Showing Her Love For The Packers!

2. Acme Packing Blog

Packers Super Bowl Media Day – At Cowboys Stadium

3. Packer Chatters

Super Bowl XLV: Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Green Bay Packers, The Teams and Their Fans

4. The Packer Backer Blog

Packers: Jclombardi Guest On NY Sports Network

5.  My Official Green Bay Packer Blog

Rodgers vs Roethlisberger

Take a few minutes out of your busy day to read this special press release “Top Bloggers Named by Boomer Diva Nation Organization!”

Also note that this press release site is free and a great tool for your blogging messages in 2011.  The service also allows you to place the embed code for the press release directly in the html of your blog. How cool!

So, once again, read the press release “Top Bloggers Named by Boomer Diva Nation and visit those great baby boomer blogs written by boomer divas!

Have you ever visited a blog that made you want to post to your own blog? Well, I have. And today I am encouraging you to visit a blog called Baby Boomer Baloney. Now, the main motivation for me is the fact that the author has a DAILY blog post.  His posts range from inspirational to insightful.

Do you know of other baby boomer blogs that motivate you to blog? Let me know.

There are, based on my observation, three types of bloggers that will blog on Labor Day.

Blogger Type #1

The Money Maker

Now this blogger has systems in place on their blogs. They have affiliates, ads, and articles that provide great content. They are blogging to send more traffic to their sites so that folks will buy and or promote their stuff. Even if they are on a cruise they probably set their blog to auto posting for the holiday. Not only do they make money in the sleep but while they are deep in conversation at a party.

Blogger Type 2

The Therapeutic Blogger

This blogger gets rid of stress by blogging. They may share the drama of the week and how it was resolved. Or they may rant about an injustice. In addition, they can vent their vibes about a current event.

Blogger Type #3

The Social Event Blogger

Before the day is over this blogger will share pictures and people connections about the happenings on this day. It could be a trip to the mall for sales or a great movie and dinner details.

Blogger Type #4

The Back To School Blogger

This blogger is sharing the excitement, extra duties, or encouragement for an upcoming school year. May include teachers who are setting up new blogs for the school year aimed at peers or students.

Blogger Type #5

The Caregiver Blogger

This blogger may share tips for other caregivers about resources or recent events related to caregiving. Since care giving seldom gets a holiday these bloggers rarely refrain from blogging when they can.

Regardless of the blog type many folks enjoy reading blogs on a Labor Day  as much as they enjoy watching the TV marathons.

Did I miss anyone?

Many of you already know about niche blogging. It is when you decide ahead of time what you are going to blog about. Except with niche blogging it is very focused on one topic. For example, if you are going to blog about blogging that is a broad  niche. But if you narrow it to  blogging for money then you are blogging about that niche.

I teach folks in my blogging class to take a good amount of time deciding on the area they are going to blog about.  It is much like setting a goal. You try to be as specific as possible and refer to it often to see if you are on target.

This morning I read an article about niche marketing that had a very interesting perspective. These marketing gurus felt that you should go broad then narrow when deciding on a niche. For example, if you are thinking about blogging on gardening then you would search on the word gardening with different variations. They could include “rose gardening” “winter gardening” etc.

The key point the article made was to look at the word “gardening” and start with that then go deeper. My summary “go wide then deep and decide.”

I strongly suggest using the free Google keyword tool.  When you want to do more extensive searches you can pay for a tool. But right now just go to Google and in the search box key in the words “Google keyword tool”.

The other thing it shows are the keywords “tags” you can use when you produce a blog post.If you are on a WordPress platform, there is a section on the dashboard that always allows you to key in tags. That is the same thing as keywords. The more relevant they are  to your post the better.

The cool thing about us baby boomers is that we have a broad area of interests based on our broad area of expertise and experience. That can make for some great blogging. What do you think?

If you want me to do a tutorial on using the free keyword tool with some pictures let me know.

Did you know that Heidi Caswell Started blogging by visiting a popular social network?  Now She helps others to start and maintain blogs.Read her comment to this post.

Please share your baby boomer blogging story. It just may help other baby boomers who are trying to decide to blog or not to blog. Help to answer that question.

One of the real reasons I started this series was to capture other stories from baby boomer bloggers. But now I am really thinking about those things that motivated me to blog.

• I wanted to become a professional blogger.
• I wanted to earn passive income from blogging and other internet strategies.
• I wanted to be able to add to my pension.
• I wanted to be able to help others in need via blogging.
• I wanted to be around more and not on the road speaking away from my mom since I am the only child and I am her” assisted living.”
• I wanted to help my husband sell his artwork online

I STILL WANT THO KEEP THESE DREAMS SO I HAVE MADE THEM GOALS

Ray and I decided to take an eight week webinar training in the evenings. These were great date nights. We would eat dinner then sit at the dinner table around the lap top or downstairs around the desk top with speakers turned high as we listened to Jeannette Cates talk about starting a business online.

Now we were already primed by other internet gurus we like and admire. But this series by Cates promised to help us set up our own website! I admit I thought it was going to be a static site and I would learn more about Dreamweaver. But before we knew it we had jumped into deep water and was swimming with WordPress.org. Oh my, that was the program that looked so hard on the VTC training that I decided it was far easier to stick with Blogger.

But it was too late. We were assigned to create this WordPress.org site and host it. We did it. We are glad we did.

Later as, as time went on, we went deeper with WordPress.org with the guidence of my friend Cathy Perkins, the infamous WordPress Wizard.

Ray and I were not born bloggers. But as baby boomers we were determined to learn. We now have many blogs and still learning.

What about you? What is your blogging story? Please, Please share. You can post as a comment or just email the story to me using rhspeak(at)aol.com

If we get enough stories we will publish them in an ebook to share with others

If you are a baby boomer blogger reading this answer just one question. Were you born a blogger? I was not born a blogger. Sure if my mom had me tested back in the early fifties they may have detected a “blog” gene. But genetic research as not, to my knowledge, been able to find that DNA relationship. Yet, many of us are baby boomers and we blog? Why? How did it start?

Ok, here is my story. Once upon a time I had someone create a website for me. Why? Because as a speaker I went to enough workshops that said, “Create a website and put the url on your business card. Include articles, products and the kinds of topics you deal with and audiences you address. Oh, and don’t forget to put a current picture up and not one showing you 20 years ago.

Well, I did that, not once but twice. Both were wonderful sites done in Dreamweaver. That is one of the finest website development packages around but the learning curve is steep. So although I knew how to change pages, create pages there was so much more to learn. I could not fix my files and much more. I became increasingly frustrated.

Remember, I am a speaker, stand up, talk, engage, get creative tell jokes but not do blogging. That sounded lonely, tedious and too hard!

Then one day I attended an NSA, (National Speakers Asssociation) conference and was introduced to this thing called blogging. I purchased the CD and listened to it over and over again in my car.Although, I did not use the same blogging platform as the speaker, I decided to create my blog using Blogger.

How did I learn Blogger?
I took an online tutorial course with VTC. I would look at the video, stop and do they said, then start the vidoe again and continue. I had a blog up and running in no time! I still had my static site but I had a blog up on presentation skills. I taught my husband and he put one up on art. What was also cool was this same  video site had a lot of free  videos you could learn from before you started paying. They also had loads of videos we could not find in the stores. Video tutorials on just about anything so we signed up for a year so we could also dip our toes in stuff like Photoshop, etc.

I started looking at the tutorials on WordPress.But at that time the installing was oh so complex. I was not ready to deal with creating databases and other stuff you had to do if you did not have a host that made it simple.

Are you ready to share your story yet?

Next, How we traveled to WordPress.org during hot date nights.