blogging 102

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

While RSS end-user adoption has been relatively slow, marketers have jumped at the chance to use this new internet channel increase their online sales.

If you’re new to the world of RSS — RSS is a simple technology that allows you to deliver your online content directly to your subscribers, other websites and the search engines. It helps you improve your content delivery, as well as increase your online traffic and reach, and even conduct business intelligence more easily.

RSS content is delivered through so-called RSS feeds, which are just simple files that carry your online content. Each of these simple files containts multiple “stories” that you may want to deliver to your audiences, called “content items”. A content item can be anything … an article, a blog post, a whole newsletter issue, a sales letter and so on.

But there is more to RSS than simply getting your content out.

One of the fields of RSS marketing is also NewsMastering, which allows you to:

[a] take multiple third-party RSS feeds,

[b] mix them together,

[c] filter your new mix using various keywords that you’re interested in,

[d] use the mix and your filters to create a new stream of content, pulling together all the content items from dozens or hundreds of other RSS feeds … but only the content items that match your filters.

You can now take this stream of content and either subscribe to it yourself, if for example you want to find out immediately what the market is saying about you, what it’s saying about your competitors, and what your competitors are doing themselves.

Or you can take this stream of content and display it on your website to:

[a] enrich the visitor experience, by giving them access to the latest and most relevant list of content from your field, such as the latest news in the field you are covering … and do so automatically;

[b] by doing so also making your website more search engine friendly, thus increasing your rankings.

But up until now doing all of this was quite complicated and really wasn’t accessible to most internet marketers.

But no longer so …

YAHOO! PIPES CHANGES THE LANDSCAPE

http://pipes.yahoo.com is the latest offering from Yahoo!, finally bringing the premise of NewsMastering to the mass market, and actually putting it on steroids.

The general idea behind Yahoo! Pipes is to allow its users to “easily” connect various internet data sources, mix them together in various ways, add additional functionality to them and create a new single output, pertaining directly to your settings.

While this may sound alot like the standard RSS aggregation & filtering we mentioned above, it actually goes much further than anything on the market in enabling you to manipulate outside sources and come up with a new content output, all of this in a visual programming environment.

The “old services” simply allowed you to combine various RSS feeds, set some basic rules on how you want to get content from them, such as limiting the output to only the content items that match your keywords and removing duplicates, and get a new single RSS feed from them. You could then subscribe to this RSS feed in your RSS Reader (for business intelligence purposes) or use it to display its contents on your website.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes much further.

[BTW - in the Yahoo! Pipes glossary, a pipe is an output you create from mixing and manipulating various content sources]

[a] Aggregate and Filter any XML Feed

Aggregate any kind of XML feed, not just RSS, which means that if your application provides an XML data output, you can now aggregate that data feed with other different feeds you might be interested in, and create a single RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS Reader. Just as an example, imagine having an RSS feed that brings you various data from your organization in a single output, such as the latest sales data from your webstore, latest account of company expenses, notifications of new employees, important team communications, your website visitor counts and so on. It even lets you combine other pipes into a new single pipe.

[b] Content Manipulation

Apply various filters, such as a keyword content filter to give you only the content you’re interested in, sort, count, truncate, join or even create your own filters. It even lets you add your own input fields. For example, you could create a pipe that aggregates all the RSS feeds from top online retailers, and include an input field that allows you to enter the name of the product you want the latest deals on, and then creates an on-the-fly output with the latest deals for this product. Essentially, it allows you to add simple or advanced search functionalities to filter out only the content you’re really interested in … from hundreds or even thousands of content sources.

[c] Social Applications

Browse through pipes created by other users to either use them as an end-user, or use their pipes to create your own new pipes. It of course also allows you to make your own pipes public and even provide them as a service to end-users.

There are really almost countless opportunities of what you can do with Yahoo! Pipes, and various new applications will surface when the service gets some milage.

The best part is, you can either create your own application that you use when the need arises from the Web, or an RSS feed that you subscribe to in your RSS Reader, to constantly deliver to you the content that you want. Or you can use the RSS feed to display that content on your website.

All of this is done through a visual interface, which might be daunting for the average user, but shouldn’t present a problem to marketers that either have the time to learn the ropes or pay a little something to a person that already has.

HOW MARKETERS WILL PROFIT

If you’re thinking of how you can profit from Yahoo! Pipes as a marketer, there really are countless opportunities.

[a] Provide highly relevant streams of content on your website to enrich the visitor experience.

[b] Become a preferred access point to relevant and latest content in your industry.

[c] Build applications that allow your visitors to easily access the content they’re interested in.

[d] Take your business intelligence activities to the next level.

And much much more …

With all the capabilities available through Yahoo! Pipes, countless new opportunities will certainly arise quickly.

The best part is, you can now more easily take advantage of them.

Author: Rok Hrastnik
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Home Solar

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Google Reader is a tool that is free to use to follow anything on the internet with an RSS feed. For the most part this is blogs, but there are also video sites and other sources of content that use RSS feeds that you can follow. Whenever there is a new item, it comes into Google Reader much like an email would, making it easy to keep up with multiple sources.

One advantage of this application is that you can find related content to the information that you are already following. If you go to the Explore tab on the left side of the reader, there will be recommended items. These items are shown to you, based on what other blogs people with related content in their readers, are subscribed to. What is nice about this, is that most of the recommendations are relevant, quality information that you might be interested in.

Another source of related content is the “like” function. When you read a post in the reader, there is a section in the bottom where you can “like” the post. Every time this happens, the count will go up. If you click on this, you can see the users who like this specific post. You can then browse any feeds that they have shared. Generally, you will find content of their that you also enjoy.

As a blog publisher, it is a good idea to have your feeds in your Google Reader account. The reason is that if you have these here, there is a higher chance that other readers will find your feed to read your content. Have a variety of related blogs that you also follow and mark posts that you like in the reader. This will help people find your content, which they will most likely enjoy since it,’s relevant to the blogs they are already reading.

Author: Jay A. Jenkin
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Solar panel DIY

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

75 Million Votes Up For Grabs

As a small media outlet focused on entrepreneurs and small businesses My Success Gateway, LLC wanted to interview some of the 2008 presidential candidates for our small media outlet web site My Success Gateway, LLC to learn the candidates positions on small businesses. I contacted the big six candidates, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

If the way the candidates are running their web site businesses is any indication of how they will be running our country in 2008 we are in deep trouble. The first problem is that some of the candidates cannot distinguish between a “small media” inquiry and a potential voter. They ALL want our donations which is hard currency and they want our votes.

This is where the big problem lies. Try and find any information on the candidates web sites about US Small Businesses, there are only 25,000,000 of them in the United States employing 51% of the work force and providing substantial receipts to the Treasury in terms of tax revenue funding things like the War in Iraq. Try and find anything about senior citizens issues or medicare or the cost of prescription drugs, you will not see it. The good news is we did find 3 mentions about our veterans on McCain’s, Obama’s and Clinton’s web sites.

John Edwards was on the small business committee when he was in the Senate but right now he seems to is concentrating his efforts on poverty. Mitt Romney was a small business owner and moved to large business. McCain’s camp did say that there was a possibility for an interview which would be great and we will see if it actually materializes and he wants to address the 25 Million small businesses by doing an interview with one of them.

Working with Eric Graham a web site conversion expert we produced a Webinar and reviewed the big six candidate web sites. We were looking for solutions from the candidates as opposed to issues. We were also looking for information on three key groups of people and how the candidates addressed them: Small Businesses, Senior Citizens and Veterans. All three groups add up to over 75 million voters. We thought that the candidates would have some information on these key groups in their web sites. We thought wrong. You will not find much at all. There appears to be a lot of empty suits or web sites all asking for money and votes, not much else.

The solution for the candidates, the media and the American public is this. The candidates put all of their “issues” into an RSS feed going out of their web sites. Next to the “issues” are their positions and SOLUTIONS. Each time they go on the campaign trail they update this content framework and make it available to the different folks who subscribe to the RSS feeds. I’d like to put this challenge out there to all candidates to come up with a top 25 issues/solutions to put into their RSS feeds.

Author: James Peake
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
car rear view camera, back up camera

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Here are some of the helpful guidelines to improve RSS feeds since it gives your site a better online visibility. The tips to be given will help optimize the RSS feeds for popular search engines.

1. Make sure to build your feeds title tags meaningful because Google gives more importance to the title tag. The title to be inserted on the title tag must be about your site and integrated with essential search keywords. Your website can surely get great publicity on the web if you make your title significant with right keywords.

2. The feeds are usually arranged in alphabetical order when it comes to feeds presentation. Hence, the feeds beginning in letter “A” will be part of the first feeds while those feeds beginning in letter “Z” will be part of the last feeds.

3. Never forget to set the opening of the link in a new tab or new window instead of the same tab when inserting external links in your content. It will help to keep the visitors stay on your website.

4. For excellent performance, submit your feeds to websites that are popular and do-follow and with high PageRank. There are many site directories that allow RSS feeds submissions.

5. Use your business logo and images in your RSS feeds since it will help enhance your business nature and of course, identity. Always bear in mind, never use JavaScript for your RSS feed because search engine bots stop when they see JavaScript on their way. Once the search engine bots views a page and see JavaScript codes it will automatically leave that page. Thus, the content of your website remains the same on Google and the links you created for the main site is not counted. Your website content may be updated in the script but not in the actual state. Just follow the quality SEO tips above, your RSS feeds will surely enhance its performance.

Author: Kiefer Johns
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Gadget reviews

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Good craft marketing can make an enormous difference to your business. To separate “marketing” from “selling”, lets call marketing the stuff you do to communicate with your potential customers. It’s not a precise description for those who are picky about these things, but it’ll do for us I think.

With the internet you have opportunity to market to a global audience, but how exactly are you going to do that? How are you going to benefit from the massive potential?

One way is by running a craft blog. They’re easy to start, fun to run and visitors love them. Done properly they’ll also rank very well in the search engines, often outranking craft sites that have been established much longer or those which might appear much bigger.

So particularly when you’re starting to sell your crafts online, when you’re just getting into craft marketing, a blog is a very valuable tool to have at your disposal.

One small, but extremely effective part of your craft blog’s armory is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Sadly many people don’t actually understand what this is and so fail to take advantage. That’s a shame, because RSS really is simple! Here’s how it works.

If you’re anything like me you probably visit a number of different craft blogs. It’s quite time consuming to visit each one and if there’s nothing of interest we just move on to the next. Putting them in your favorites reduces the time, but sometimes we just don’t bother to visit because we don’t have the time or inclination.

What if we could go to just one page though, where we could see a run down of the latest posts from all our favorite craft blogs? That would be quick, wouldn’t it. Then you could just visit those who actually had stuff you were interested in. Great idea!

Well that’s exactly what RSS does and that’s why it’s important to your craft marketing. People might visit your blog every so often, but if you get them to subscribe to your RSS (otherwise known as RSS feed) then they can check up on your news quickly and easily.

Now it might be argued that it would be better if they came by your blog – which is true – but you have to accept that most people aren’t going to do that with any regularity. It’s also a good idea to have a newsletter so you can get in touch and market to them directly (more on that in another article).

However, good craft marketing means taking advantage of every opportunity to get your message in front of your potential customer and RSS is not only fast and easy but once set up requires no further involvement from you – it automatically sends out new post information every time you write one!

Author: Bob Beacham
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Cool mobile gadgets