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Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Why Blogging is Essential to Your Business

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

In the ‘good old days’ – not so long ago it seems – you used to keep in-touch with your customers using phone calls, email messages and face to face meetings. Nowadays the world has changed. People expect even more frequent updates, yet it’s nearly impossible to meet with every business contact on a regular basis.

Thankfully, blogging has come to the rescue. Setting up a blog on your web site – and having an associated RSS feed – means you can keep in constant touch with your clients and potential customers. Plus you don’t have to email them and they can get your latest news without having to visit your web site.

So how does this all work? A blog is really a fancy name for a web page that gets updated regularly. It’s nothing special. There are several methods of writing ‘blogs’, but they are nothing more than computer programs which allow you to easily update a web page. Far and away the easiest way to start a blog is with a website called blogger.com.

However, for keeping in touch with your customers, RSS is the key. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that your blog can be automatically delivered to people who want to read it – you don’t have to send it to them and neither do they have to come and collect it. All they need is the address of your RSS Feed and their RSS Newsreader can do the job for them. There are several RSS readers available and new web browsers incorporate the ability to read RSS feeds and keep them updated.

Whenever you add new content to your blog, the RSS Feed automatically gets updated in everyone’s Reader program or web browser. That means you are guaranteed to be able to keep in touch with clients and prospects. You don’t have to do anything other than produce the content. Equally, you don’t face the problems of email filters and anti-spam programs blocking your email. Furthermore, people tend to read RSS Feeds because they have subscribed to them whereas they tend to ignore non urgent emails.

As you can see, there are several advantages to Blogs and RSS Feeds. But it doesn’t stop there. Search engines love them. That’s because blogs provide fresh and new content – precisely what searchers are looking for. Hence the search engines are actively pushing blogs higher up the search engine ranking. This means if you don’t have a blog for your business, you are seriously reducing your chances of a high search engine ranking. You need a blog nowadays to get noticed by the search engines.

So, blogging is essential. Not only does it improve your web presence, it also means you can keep in touch with clients and prospects more easily. And all the marketing research you can find will tell you that keeping in regular touch with your customers is an important component in gaining new business. So get blogging!

Richard Wing of BestDamnRedirect.com, offers a practicle and useful tool for online marketers. This centralized solution to assist online businesses is a redirect url generator, product & link directory, rss feed generator & aggregator, tweet poster and social bookmarking tool. Best Damn Redirect leverages the data from a single entry to instantly & easily automate your business.

Tags: blog, Blogging, marketing, RSS, rss feeds, traffic generation, wordpress
Posted in Blogging, RSS | 1 Comment »

Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to Make Money

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

You may already know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but what does that really mean to you and more importantly, how can you use RSS to help you make more money?

Simply put, RSS feeds are written in XML, a special mark up language much like html. That means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

These readers are subscribed to certain RSS feeds and constantly monitor them, alerting the user when every any new information has been added to the feed. So, how can you use this to your advantage as an internet marketer? Here are the most popular ways to integrate RSS feeds into your marketing effort: you can use RSS to replace any email marketing you are currently doing, take advantage of RSS feeds to drive traffic to your blog or sales site or create your own RSS feed so your messages and information show up on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

Although many marketing gurus will claim that email marketing isn’t dead, with the advent of increasing spam complaints and filters coupled with the threat of viruses originating from an email, more and more people are leery of even opening your email. So even if you have a large email list, the likelihood of your emails being opened is becoming increasingly slim.

With RSS, your messages won’t ever get filtered and have a much higher chance of actually being read vs. a typical email. And your marketing results can only be better when people actually read your message. You can even incorporate autoresponders in conjunction with RSS.

Including RSS feeds on your content site or blog allows you to add fully dynamic theme-related content to your web pages making your site or blog very popular with the search engines. The constantly updated content is exactly what the search engines crave and helps increase your search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your page.

Probably the best way to use RSS to help your online marketing efforts is to create your own RSS feed. This way your information will be published on any website that is using the RSS feed you are supplying that information to. There’s even automated software to submit your RSS feeds to the various directories that supply the feeds to marketers using them as described above.

RSS is still a relatively unknown method of driving traffic to websites, but is becoming more popular every day. As an internet marketer, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of this new technology before the rest of the online gurus jump on the bandwagon.

Tags: affiliate, affiliate link, affiliate marketing, blog, marketing, optimize, RSS, rss feeds, traffic generation
Posted in RSS | 1 Comment »

Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

There are three key areas that you can enhance on your WordPress blog that will help you optimize it. The areas are adding additional ping service websites, using Feedburner, and using keyword-rich categories.

Ping Services

The first thing that you should do is add additional ping services to your WordPress blog. You must have administrative rights to your blog and be logged in to gain access the ping service option.

Once logged into your WordPress blog’s backend, click on the “Option” tab and then click on the “Writing” tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will see “Update Services” and a box under this title. There are a couple of ping services listed but you can add the following list by copying and pasting in the ping service list box. To complete the process, click on “Update Options”.

http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

Feedburner

As a blog owner, being able to capture your blog traffic and generate reports is very important to knowing what you need to do to optimize your blog. One blog tool that works to help optimize your blog is Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to redirect your blog RSS feed through their service so that it can reach targeted blog visitors better.

This helps with optimization by allowing your RSS feed to have built-in options for bloggers to use as they read your blog’s RSS feed. This brings in a stickiness factor which is always good for optimizing your blog. Some of the blog tools that Feedburner allows you to use so that you can increase the effectiveness of your blog are:

Analyze: you will be able to see real-time and accumulated statistics about your blog’s visitor information. This will help you understand the traffic that is going in and out of your blog. This allows you to better target your optimization efforts to specific areas of your blog.

Optimize: allows you to make your blog “browser friendly” so that subscribing to your blog is easy. SmartFeed(R) is an option that you can use to make sure that your blog is compatible for most blog readers. You can even build interactivity into each individual post by using FeedFlare(R) which allows you to add links at the end of each post such as “Email Post” or “Subscribe to Feed.”

Publicize: is another way for you to make sure that your blog attracts web visitors. A couple of the tools that you may use is “Email Subscriptions” and “BuzzBoost”. Email Subscriptions will give your web visitors the opportunity to receive an email once a day alerting them that you have updated your blog. Then BuzzBoost(R) allows you to republish your feed as HTML so that you can add it as a Page on any of your other websites or WordPress blogs.

Using Categories as Keywords

The easiest way to optimize your blog with keywords is to use categories that not only define each post but also relate to other posts on your blog. WordPress blog software uses categories as a way to “tag” search engines so they can be alerted that a new post has been added to your blog for a specific topic area.

Categories are also another way to easily organize the content on your blog. When you list the categories on the sidebar of your blog, it gives your blog visitors the opportunity to see all the content of your blog for a particular topic.

Tags: blog, Blogging, optimize, ping services, RSS, rss feeds, traffic generation, wordpress
Posted in RSS | 2 Comments »

Is Your Affiliate Identity Safe?

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Identity theft is a hot topic today and the Internet is no exception. Aside from banking online and ordering via credit cards online security concerns, have you considered that your online affiliate identity might also be at risk?

The numbers vary depending upon the source quoted, but conservative estimates indicate that 10% to 40% of affiliate sales are lost. Why? Internet pirates can, and often do, steal, bypass or otherwise mutilate your affiliate link, thereby robbing you of hard-earned sales.

Are you fed up with lazy and unscrupulous people who, instead of using their misplaced energy to create something special of their own, prefer to just suck the life out of someone else’s endeavors? Are there ways to stop these pirates who can spoil your online marketing efforts?

Yes, there are. One solution is called “redirecting,” which simply means that you set up a domain name that will forward to the specific link you want to go to, but will not show your entire affiliate ID. The redirect will show only your domain name. Not only is this a “prettier” picture than those long, cumbersome, ugly, and often distracting affiliate links, but it will give you more credibility, which in turn can build more trust in you and/or what you are offering. Some companies offer e-mail forwarding as well, so that your e-mail contact information can also reflect your domain name.

Should this cost a lot? No. You can find a company that costs you pennies a day for their services. Several features should be considered when choosing a domain forwarding or redirect company. Ideally, the company should:

Charge a one-time set up fee for your domain name;

Offer unlimited sub-domains, which allow you to manage multiple affiliate programs from one domain name;

Offer domains that can be bookmarked, which means that every time a customer goes back to the site, they see your domain name (and you get the commission);

Optimize search engine indexing, allowing you to change the title, mega description and keyword tags for your domain name, easily and in minutes. Normal affiliate links are almost never indexed, so choose a domain provider that is designed to be indexed by all major search engines.

Do not require that you pay a monthly hosting fee or require you to buy software, ever; and,

Do not require software or technical expertise in order to use. Choose one that is user-friendly to your level of technical or software knowledge.

Finally, choose a keyword-loaded domain name that is easy to remember looks attractive and represents you in a professional, yet personal manner that suits your personality and/or what you are promoting.

Domain forwarding will take you a long way towards building a credible, trustworthy business. Good domain forwarding companies who offer most, if not all, of the benefits listed here, are worth their weight in gold.

Tags: affiliate, affiliate link, affiliate marketing, blog, cloak, marketing, re-direct, Redirect, security, theft, traffic generation
Posted in Redirect | 1 Comment »

Three Reasons Why You Should Re-Direct Your Affiliate Links

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Affiliate marketing can make you a decent amount of income on the side without having your own product and sales copy.

The trick is to be different and not appear like everyone else. One main way to look different is to re-direct or cloak your affiliate link.

However, this article is going to tell you three other ways that re-directing your affiliate links can benefit you.

The first is Spam. When you use the same link coming from the same domain as everyone else, the spam filters start to pick up on that domain as being a sales letter email and blocking it as spam. i.e.

www.affiliateprogram.com/?id=111

So when ever the filters see www.affiliateprogram.com in the email it will get blocked as spam and get blacklisted, especially if it is a large promotion.

By re-directing the link – it will have your domain as the link and help to make it thru the spam filters.

The second reason is search engine optimization. If you write articles and submit them with a signature file that has the affiliate link, the affiliate site gets the back links. Plus it makes it easy for people to get rid of your affiliate id.

By using your domain as a redirect to the affiliate program you get the back links to your site and better SEO rankings.

The third reason is that it will make you look more professional as a marketer and not just someone who is out promoting all kinds of affiliate programs. When potential customers see

http://affiliateprogram.com/?id=111 they know it is an affiliate program and will be less likely to click on it.

However when they see

http://yourdoamin.com/affilliatename or http://yourdomain.com/recommends/program

They will view it more as your personal offer or recommendation.

There are many programs that offer to change your links. Many are simple software solutions and can have you changing all your links easily. The programs for changing links do not have to be pricey at all, and many are available as freeware or shareware through popular sites that offer these kinds of products.

Whatever program or software you choose, the key is to make your domain as the primary one. This will make your site seem more like the authority and have potential customers clicking away on your links in no time.

Tags: affiliate, affiliate link, affiliate marketing, blog, Blogging, cloak, marketing, re-direct, Redirect, traffic generation, wordpress
Posted in Redirect | 1 Comment »

Create a RSS Feed – More Free Traffic to Your Static Web Pages-Pt1

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Most sites on the web were built before the invasion of the wordpress blogging platform was in general use. Using a html editor created functional and beautiful sites. However they do not provide for the ease of traffic generation that a wordpress blogging platform provides.

The wordpress platform allows for more social traffic in many ways. Three of which are:
1) The use of automatic pinging when new posts are made to the blog.
2) Provides a continuously updated rss feed for visitors to add to their favorite feed readers such as Google, Yahoo and Bloglines, inviting returning visitor traffic.
3) Automatic updating of the rss (really simple syndication) feeds that can be submitted to rss feed directories.

Meanwhile, sites created with html editors, static page sites or adsense template sites, have become the poor cousin to the blogging sites when it comes to traffic generation.

It is not that these sites cannot achieve the traffic generating results of the wordpress blogging platform. They can, but it will require more knowledge and more work to achieve the same result. For example, how do you acquire rss traffic when a static or adsense template site cannot generate a rss feed automatically? Simple answer, create a rss feed manually.

It may sound like a daunting task, at first, but keep reading. Its as simple as basic html, with the use of open and close tags.

Basic html code:

XXhtmlXY
XXheadXY
XXtitleXYINSERT TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XX/headXY
XXbodyXYINSERT BODY CONTENT HEREXX/bodyXY
XX/htmlXY

Go to any blog, click on the rss icon and take a look at the rss feed structure. It should look like this:

XXrss version=”0.91″XY
-
XXchannelXY
XXtitleXYINSERT RSS FEED TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XXlinkXYhttp://www.YOURSITEURLHEREXX/linkXY
XXdescriptionXYINSERT RSS FEED DESCRIPTION HEREXX/descriptionXY
XXlanguageXYen-usXX/languageXY
-
XXitemXY
XXtitleXYINSERT ITEM TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XXlinkXYhttp://www.YOURSITEURLHEREXX/link>XY
XXdescriptionXYINSERT ITEM DESCRIPTION HEREXX/descriptionXY
XX/itemXY
XX/channelXY
XX/rssXY

If you would prefer a little automation then Internet.com has a great free tool, just search for ‘channel editor” on their site or go to:
http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl. This tool will generate the out put you need.

Creating a rss feed is simple and easy once you understand the structure. Now you can see the potential for your static and adsense template websites. Copy the above code or what you automatically generated into notepad and save as whatever name you would like for your feed page name. Upload this text file to your site folder and rename the .txt extension to .rss.

That is all. You now have a rss feed for your static site. In part 2 of this article, you will learn what comes next and what you need to do with the rss feed you just created to drive more traffic to your static web pages and adsense template sites using rss feeds.

Tags: blog, Blogging, RSS, rss feeds, traffic generation, wordpress
Posted in RSS | No Comments »