blogging 102

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes You have the website, the product, and compelling content to attract readers to purchase your book, your CD, or whatever items you choose to sell. You may notice a surge in traffic as you build your site and employ various search engine optimization tactics, but are not wholly satisfied. You know you can attract more visitors if you could just reach them. You have a weblog attached to your site, and you write wonderful articles which receive much praise. What else is there to do? Have you considered syndicating your content and products to users with an RSS feed? Do you even know what RSS is? Simply defined, RSS is an XML-based format. XML, for the novice, stands for Xtreme Markup Language, a special coding language that represents information for resources in the World Wide Web. Using the XML, one can permit the distribution, or syndication, of content to users who collect such data through specialized aggregators, or readers. RSS stands for Real Simple... 

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes What is RSS? You probably have seen this three-letter acronym in the course of your internet surfing. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website. An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source. What are the benefits of RSS? RSS gives benefits to both readers (users) and web publishers. 1. It gives you the latest updates. Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updates site learn about the latest as... 

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes Digg Every blogger should have a Digg account, no matter where you blog. If you don’t write crap for blog content, it won’t long before someone starts Digging your posts. You are going to need an account to help with the self promotion and respond to people Digging your work. As you build your network you can shout out not just your cool new finds but the ones elsewhere to your friends. Digging others is almost as important as getting dug yourself, since people do profile the people Digging them, especially when you’re among the first to Digg a new page or the other user is just getting started. On that same note you should be profiling the people Digging you and reading their work, not just to be nice either. You reap what you sew in social networking. Popularity snowballs on Social Networking. Stumbleupon Just like with Digg every Blogger should get a Stumbleupon account. At first you should be asking your friends to your posts not to mention...