Oil gains 2 percent on Libyan disruption, OPEC deal extension hopes

By Devika Krishna Kumar
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose nearly 2 percent on Tuesday after a severe disruption to Libyan oil supplies and on comments from officials suggesting OPEC could extend its production cuts deal to the end of the year.
Production at the western Libyan fields of Sharara and Wafa has been blocked by armed factions, reducing output by 252,000 barrels per day (bpd), about a third of production , said a source at the National Oil Corporation (NOC).
NOC has declared force majeure on crude loadings from the Sharara oilfield.
Brent crude futures (LCOc1) gained 95 cents, or 1.9 percent to $51.70 per barrel by 11:00 a.m. EDT. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude (CLc1) rose 84 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $48.57 a barrel.
"The closure of two Libyan oil fields ... is supporting the market today with the timing of a potential restart uncertain after militias in western Libya shut key pipelines," Tim Evans, an energy futures specialist at Citi Futures said in a note.
"Past outages have ranged from a few days all the way up to two years, although the need for oil revenues will be a strong incentive to negotiate a pipeline restart sooner rather than later."
Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said a global deal aimed at reining in a glut that crushed prices for about two years is likely to be extended beyond June, but that time is needed to discuss the subject thoroughly first.
Russia, a non-OPEC member, is seen as a wild card and 15 years ago failed to deliver on promises to cut in tandem with OPEC. However, Russia and Iran will continue cooperation in reducing oil output, according to a joint statement signed by both countries.
Non-OPEC member Azerbaijan also said it was ready to join an extension of the deal into the second half of this year.
Major oil traders gathered in Switzerland this week said they expected OPEC and non-OPEC producers to extend their pact to curb output in the second half of this year, providing Russia complies.
But prices were still weighed on by a resurgence in U.S. oil production and the expectation that inventories there would build up once again, illustrating the persistent global supply overhang that has depressed prices for three years.
Analysts polled by Reuters ahead of weekly data forecast U.S. crude oil stocks rose 1.2 million barrels last week to a fresh record. [EIA/S]
Data from the American Petroleum Institute is due at 4:30 p.m. followed by the report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration data at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
Saxo Bank Head of Commodity Strategy Ole Hansen said supply remained in focus ahead of the EIA oil stocks report on Wednesday, "where an increase of more than 322,000 barrels will see Cushing hit a record".
Rising stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage site and delivery point for WTI tend to depress the U.S. benchmark, widening its discount to Brent , which in turn makes U.S. crude oil attractive to importers.
U.S. crude exports are poised to pick up, analysts and traders said, as rising domestic production has pushed WTI's discount to Brent to its steepest since the United States lifted a ban on exports in late 2015.

Forex - Canadian dollar almost unchanged against softer greenback

The Canadian dollar was almost unchanged on Monday against its broadly weaker U.S. counterpart as growing doubts over the Trump administration’s ability to push through its economic agenda continued to dominate market sentiment.
USD/CAD was at 1.3369 by 09.33 ET, not far from Monday’s close of 1.3375. The pair traded in a range of 1.3414 to 1.3365.
The U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback’s strength against a trade-weighted basket of six major currencies, was last at 98.97. The index plumbed 98.67 on Monday, its lowest trough since November 11.
The dollar remained on the defensive after the failure of U.S. Republicans to get enough support for their own bill to overhaul healthcare rattled investors.
The setback for the White House added to skepticism over the Trump administration’s ability to work with Congress to deliver on the president’s pro-growth economic agenda, including tax cuts and infrastructure spending.
The dollar index had surged to almost 14-year highs in early January propelled higher by expectations for a strong economic recovery and higher inflation, the so-called ‘Trump Trade’.
But the greenback found some support after remarks by Federal Reserve officials shifted investor focus back to the prospect of more U.S. interest rate hikes.
The loonie, as the Canadian dollar is also known, was supported by higher prices for oil, a major Canadian export.
Oil prices were boosted by hopes that an OPEC-led production cut, aimed at cutting a global supply glut and supporting the market will be extended through the end of the year.

Managing Multiple Blogs Successfully

Realizing the tremendous potential of blogging in internet marketing, many bloggers have taken to maintaining multiple blogs.
While this is one way to boost sales, bloggers have must take extra care to make sure that the content in their various blogs is original and distinctly different from each other. Even the blogs are related, it is important that each of the blogs should contain original postings so that visitors do not feel as though they are receiving information that is being recycled.

If visitors start feeling that the postings are getting redundant, they are likely to start feeling that visiting any one of the blogs is enough for them to garner the information they are looking for and the other blogs are simply a waste of time.

Bloggers should also remember that stealing posts from other associated blogs is not likely to help much and is more liable to discredit their blog. For one thing it is illegal and for another, devoted readers of the original blog will soon catch on to the scam.
Dedicating separate time to work on each blog and keeping all blogs up to date are the two fundamental techniques that will help you juggle multiple blogs successfully.

Dedicating Time for Each Blog

Maintaining a blog requires time and commitment. Bloggers who desire to maintain multiple blogs need to ensure that they budget their time carefully and allocate sufficient time to each of their blogs. Each blog is equally important and should not be neglected. Mismanagement of time can lead to neglecting one or more of the blogs, resulting in a significant decline in traffic.
Start out by determining the requirements of each blog. You may find that some blogs require far less time and effort to keep them functioning properly, especially those that are based on research. Other blogs that are not research intensive to maintain may be easier to maintain. Determining the time that is needed to maintain each blog and scheduling your time accordingly is the key to juggling multiple sites.
It is important to evaluate your sites regularly and make the necessary adjustments depending on the progress of the various blogs. If need be, eliminate a blog; spending more time on maintaining fewer blogs is far more effective than having and mismanaging a whole lot of blogs.

Keep All Blogs Up to Date

Multiple blog owners should also take measures to ensure that every one of their blogs is kept up to date. This involves getting fresh content regularly posted on each blog, which will help prevent the feeling of déja vu that a visitor is otherwise likely to experience over time if the blog is not updated.
Even the most informative and interesting blog will soon lose its appeal and lose traffic if new content is not regularly posted. With the sheer number of sites that are available to internet users, blog visitors can afford to be choosy and are highly unlikely to change their loyalties to other blogs that offer updates and fresh content on more frequent basis.

5 Blogging Tips To Promote Your Internet Home Based Business

When you first created your new blog, chances are that you have virtually no traffic coming to your blog. This is despite how beautiful your blog may look, or having a well written, rich and unique content posts. This article shares some of the best blogging techniques that you can use in promoting your nternet home based business.

Blog Commenting

One good way to find targeted quality readers for your blog, is through blog commenting on other similar niche blogs. If you focused on similar niche topic on other blogs, the readers will be very interested in what you have written as well as your valued opinion.
This is even more so if you have already established yourself as a well known expert writer in your business niche. Within a similar business niche, you probably share a lot of common interest with these people or marketing similar products for your internet home based business. However as there are no two marketers who have the same approach in providing profitable solutions on their online business opportunity or ideas in promoting an internet home based business, the continuous interaction among bloggers would always be welcomed by all.
You may not see immediate traffic growth, but if you make commenting on blogs a daily practice, you will over time, see quite a big number of bloggers of similar niches, visiting your blog.

Frequent Blog Posts

Now that you have learned that Blog Commenting will over time, bring targeted traffic to your blog, you really need to ensure that you always have good, unique and informative contents to offer your readers. Place yourself as the one looking for useful information or brilliant ideas to make money for your own internet home based business. You would like to see creative and unique contents that you think is vital to your business growth or your new online business opportunity. You should aim to write at least two such blog posts in a week.

Your Blog Title Tags

Title tags are what comes up at the top of the browser when viewing a page and shows up in search engine results as the title of your post. It is also the only information available to the surfer after he puts his query in the search engine box, so it is important to put your best effort here. Your title tag description should include your keywords you are targeting for your internet home based business. It must therefore describe your contents not only accurately but convey a well-written message to entice the reader to want to click further to read up the information that you offer for your online business opportunity. The keywords in your title tag may or may not be necessarily found in your website content page.

Get Feedback From Your Readers

Have you ever felt like impossible to write fresh, unique content for your blog? Sometimes you also felt like you have reached a stage where you don't have any new developments to update on your internet home based business. How are you expected to satisfy your readers' demands? Well, one very good way is to obtain a feedback from your readers. You can easily put a feedback section on your blog and customize some simple questions to obtain such feedback that will give you more ideas to write about. However do ensure that you have sufficient people participating in the feedback before you arrived at the results.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging really means you write a blog post at someone else's blog or someone else writes and publishes a post on yours. One of the benefits of doing this is provide your readers with fresh articles to read or showing a different aspect of the topic. It also provides better exposure for you and your internet home based business which you are promoting. Depending on how high the page rank of the blog, you may enjoy higher traffic on your blog posts and more importantly to your main webpage. One of the benefits of guest blogging is that you are no longer bound by rules governed by article directories, allowing you more links in your post, or anchor text pointing to your website. Guest blogging therefore helps to generate more traffic for your online business opportunity besides helping to establish your name in the niche market and lets you reach out to a wider audience to promote your internet home based business.