blogging 102

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... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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...