One of the very first articles I ever wrote on Internet Marketing had to do with RSS and it was entitled “10 Reasons To Put RSS On Your Site.” That was in 2004 and RSS was somewhat new and many webmasters were just beginning to place blogs and RSS feeds on their sites. If you do a search in Google, you can still find that article on around 2,000 sites.

Most people now refer to RSS as “Really Simple Syndication” — although it originally stood for “Rich Site Summary” and was a very simple way of summarizing and syndicating your content in real-time to all interested parties.

RSS had its early beginnings with Netscape in 1991 which introduced the first version of RSS (RDF Site Summary). Later versions would be introduced and made popular by Dave Winer of ScriptingNews and Userland fame who is considered by many to be one of the major founding fathers of RSS.

Most people today associate RSS with blogs and blogging. You can read RSS content by using an RSS feed reader or “aggregator” which can be desktop or web-based. Some common feed readers include FeedDemon, My Yahoo!, iGoogle and Firefox (Live Bookmarks). You subscribe to your favorite RSS feed by clicking the small icon on your favorite blog or site and then when fresh content is published via RSS your reader can immediately retrieve and display it for you.

RSS is a very simple way of keeping up to date and in contact with your favorite site or topic. It makes staying informed easy to do and it provides site/blog owners a simple way of distributing their content.

One can’t but wonder has RSS lived up to all that early hype?

Perhaps that question can only be answered by looking at the popularity of blogging and the role it now plays on the web. No one can deny blogs and their accompanying RSS feeds carry tremendous weight, no matter which way you measure it. Can anyone now imagine the World Wide Web without blogs?

But the importance of RSS goes beyond just blogging, we tend to forget how important it is for all the new social media sites like Digg, Technorati, Reddit… and not to forget fast growing applications like Twitter.

People also forget RSS feeds play a major role in online retail and affiliate programs. For example, you can get an RSS feed of all the latest Amazon products to place on your site. Many major online companies now have these product feeds to help promote and sell their wares.

XML and RSS have blended so seamlessly into many browsers and operating systems most users are blissfully unaware they’re even using RSS. Maybe that’s how things should be; with RSS, the ever-present workhorse, quietly doing its job behind the scenes.

RSS is just as important now as it was five years ago; actually its influence and presence has only grown stronger over the years. If you have not fully embraced RSS and placed it on your site and in your online marketing you’re missing out on one of the best opportunities to spread your message on the web.

RSS is here to stay and even has its own advisory board to help with the technical and programming side of RSS. They also list a very handy “RSS Best Practices Profile” for any webmaster wishing to create their own XML-based RSS documents. rssboard.org

Why should you use RSS?

Well, the list of reasons is quite long but RSS can help you: syndicate your content in real-time, sell your products, build your list, gather fresh content, promote your company and boost that one vital element everyone needs more of on the web — traffic. For those who have taken full advantage of RSS it has delivered in more ways than one for it has truly turned into that Golden Goose with the Midas complex. RSS has simply proven beneficial to those users who have fully embraced it.

Now, you still don’t really need 10 reasons to put RSS on your site, do you?

Author: Titus Hoskins
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Duty on LCD/Plasma TV

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the most important thing to make money online. If you know the basic concept of SEO, you can be confident to make money online by SEO. Here I am jotting down best SEO tactics that I have learned from hands on SEO experience on SEO for online marketing.

1) Think where to write SEO articles? Answer is – blog, website or article submission websites. If you have a blog or website, SEO is important to promote your website through search engines by doing SEO. If you have a good search engine ranking, you can get more target traffic/visitor to your website and if you run Google adsense /adbrite/chitika or any other contexual ad providers, your earning potential will be increased by an increasing CTR (click through rate).

If you have no website but you want to promote your affiliate product, then SEO for article marketing is important to you for your affiliate marketing. Figure out the right product for your affiliate marketing.

2) Now decide what topic you should choose. You need to research on various SEO trends, Google search volume on particular keyword, Google AdWord selector tool to select best paying and popular keywords and the most important tool is to use some best keyword selector tools like KEYWORD ELITE 2.0. You choose the best keywords with maximum volume of global search and good no. of advertiser competitions. Learn Why Keyword Elite 2.0 Will Allow You To Dominate The Competition

3) Now comes SEO content writing. Try to focus on the most important 3 keywords or key phrases that you have researched from KEYWORD ELITE2.0. Try to use these keywords meaningfully in your content title and use frequently in your content body. The content body should contain a SEO keyword density of 3-4%. So, if you write a 300 words article, it should contain 9-12 times repeatation of that particular keyword in your content. You have to maintain keyword proximity too. That means the most important keywords should be in a sequence and close to each other. It gives the content a SEO boost.

4) Now if you have a website, use title tag, meta description, meta tag optimization for good SEO and then paste the SEO content in website content area. The title should contain 3 keywords and meta description and title should be relevant to the content of the website. Try to put some unique keyphrases/combination of keywords to make your title different from the crowd. Your creativity along with the techniques I described is vital for a good SEO title. Then write a keyword rich meta description (meaningful)
You can use H1-H6 tags in your web page HTML to boost SEO. Also don’t forget to put put alt text for images. If you have blogs try to put some good blogger hacks for better SEO

5) Put keyword rich anchor text in body of the content, that links to your other web pages. Cross linking with anchor text is a must for good SEO practice.

6) If you are writing articles put your signature line and affiliate links there. the rest of the SEO article writing is same as discussed above. Also using Mass Article Control Tool is a good choice to make money by article marketing

7) If you are using wordpress, then change your permalink structure to custom field /%postname%/ or anything else you would like that act as static HTML pages. Also use All in one SEO plugins and other best wordpress plugins for good SEO. The keyword research is sufficient if you use KEYWORD ELITE2.0. It will save your time and effort to make you decide what niche you should choose to work and to make money online. Don’t forget to upgrade your wordpress to latest version.

Now comes promotion of your content by SEO. Do link exchange with other good relevant sites. Give links to other authority sites like Google, yahoo, wikipedia from your site. Do social media marketing and social bookmarking in Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, Simpy, Mixx, Netvine, Mybloglog, Technorati, Blogcatalog, and Feedburner for the best SEO

9) Submit your article or sites to article directories, blog directories. Do rss submissions for better SEO.

10) Write free press releases and submit that also acts good to boost up your backlinks and thus SEO

11) Use SEO tools like SEO centro meta analyzer, keyword density checker, page rank checker, Google banned checker, Google webmaster central, domaintools to get your SEO score.

12) Always update your self what is happening in internet marketing and SEO industry. Read Google’s Matt Cut’s blog, problogger.net and search Google on different other SEO topics. Read 2 SEO Tips That I Bet You Really Didn’t Know

Hope you like these SEO tips that I have summed up here to give you a brief idea on SEO and online marketing tips to promote your website and to earn money.

Author: Debajyoti Banerjee
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Wordpress plugin expert

Gauging Progress is a tough thing to do for a new blog and one of the hardest things for you to do when a blog is only ten days old.  it is even harder to gauge the progress than it is to attract visitors.  None the less you need to do it, just as much as you need to attract new visitors every day.  Let’s take a look at Meme Connection again.

• Since the blog went online we have dropped our Alexa number 3.2M and that is down from 3.5 on Sunday when I checked it last and down from 7.5M on the first.  i think I may well meet the goal I set of under 1M by the end of the month at this rate if I keep it up.
• Google has been good to us as well.  For the unquoted terms meme and connection the site or sites linking to Meme Connection carry nine of the top ten slots.  For a site that went online fifteen days ago that is pretty impressive even if the terms aren’t well searched, since there are 6.5M search results.
• Google Analytics says my visitors thus far are 55% referring traffic, 34% direct traffic, 8% search traffic, and the rest is made up of other and I have no idea what “other” actually constitutes.  I do know however that a large amount of the total traffic comes from sites looking at my profile.  I also know that a large amount of direct traffic is from twitter, or more precisely from the Twhirl client, which registers as direct rather than referring for some reason.  I have seen this happen on other sites using both Google Analytics and other real time metrics programs.

Things I still need to is spend more time commenting on other blogs and putting the name out there.  I need to find new members willing to create or submit memes.  Lastly I need to keep doing more of what I am doing and researching keywords to use in google that will rank well for Google.

For the record contributors who sign up you get a profile with live links and post links.  i do visit every link and those who put up spam crap can expect to find themselves site banned.

There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running.

Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now.

The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks.

Simple Tags takes over most of what was done by most of the old tagging plugins did. While it alone doesn’t do everything UTW did that can be handled by Headspace2. There are two more tagging plugins you may wish to consider as options. Gormful’s Technorati Tags will give you another formatting option. Tag This will allow users to add/suggest tags at will or with the parameters you set.

Headspace2 while a more complicated option than the much love All In One SEO Pack, is simply a more powerful tool and one you would do well to learn. Mani at the Daily SEO Blog has a very good tutorial on Headspace2. He also confirms my suspicion if you are using Google XML Sitemaps you can’t use both Headspace2 and AIOSP without causing plugin clash. This video will give you a nice look at Headspace2.

The two standard plugins most people list and I will confirm is the default Akismet for spam control and Google XML Sitemap plugin for indexing. Both of these are pretty standard among power WordPress Bloggers because they work. There are other options like GT Site Crawler that may be better for indexing your site if it contains more than just a blog.

The next problem one faces with their blog is linking. In my opinion if you are using a good spam plugin like Akismet and practice good comment policy like requiring name and email and a previously approved comment then turning off the nofollow will gain you more than you lose in time. I have used the DoFollow plugin for some time but have just recently started looking at the more customizable NoFollow Free. Either way you go the plugin works well in WP 2.5, but don’t use them both.

Once you decide which nofollow plugin to use. You need to think about how the nofollow and duplicate content affects your SEO. To clue you into this plugin I give you the words of Andy Beard the plugins creator.

“This plugin is intended to be used in advanced linking structures such as those described in Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches

Rather than blocking duplicate content pages, they can be used to your advantage…. (NFTD) has a method of channeling “Google Juice” away from pages that are receiving the majority of links, to pages that you wish to rank well, and also to your homepage to enhance monetization.”

For the record I recommend Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches wholeheartedly.

WordPress comes with the Tiny MCE editor, but the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin will greatly expand the functionality to almost the point of being as good as MS Word for features. The good thing is depending on the kind of blog you run most of these features are useful and easily added or removed.

The next three are really optional plugins, but I have included them because of how useful they are. First as a writer and avid reader I like two spaces between sentences. This is what you get with the Extra Sentence Space plugin from Coffee to Code. The Disable wpautop, removes WordPress’s automatic paragraph formatting. This is useful for those who wish to have more control of elements from their style sheet. Excerpt Editor does a great job auto-generating your excerpt and can easily be customized. This is important for your front page SEO and channeling Google Juice to the right places.

Along with post style controlled from your style sheet I believe that most of your image and video styling should not be plugin control, but rather be a function of either WordPress’s native image/video functions or controlled from your CSS. There are a few image video plugins that I do find handy though. The only Image related plugins I use at the moment is Flexible upload and SEO Friendly Images. Flexible upload handles some of issues that were present in 2.5’s first release. SEO Friendly Images takes care of some of the extra bits like image description and alt info automatically.

Last but not least important are your social plugins. The first one to mention is the LiveJournal Cross Poster (LJXP) I am hosting the hacked version of this that is friendly to both 2.3 and 2.5 installs. If you still have friends there or want to simply post excerpts with links back into some of the promo communities this plugin will be your best friend. You can also download the excerpts from LJ and post them to any number of other blogs easily enough. I aggregate all 4 of my blogs LJXPs on WordPress.com. You can also snatch the HTML code from the LJ post and post it to a fair number of other blogging communities like Blogger and MySpace.

(There is a MySpace crossposter but I have never made it work and no one I have ever met has been able to either. If anyone gets it to work please let me know)

The next group of social tools includes Twitter Tools which is very good about posting your blog post updates to twitter, but it sucks for posting your tweets on your blog. For tweet posting I prefer MyTwitter which will allow you to hard code your tweeting and place it anywhere you want on your blog. You can also use the hard coding methods described on your Twitter account. The one thing you do need to know about twitter tools and the 2.5 widget layout. You have to uninstall the plugin or change themes to remove the widget.

The plugin I feel you almost certainly need to have if you are a serious blogger is a social bookmarking plugin. I prefer Share This for two reasons. One it has a small footprint and can be hard coded for exact placement. Secondly it has tracking available for your blog. If you want a bigger selection of Social Sites on hand, especially if you are using non US English sites I suggest using Sociable. You will have a bigger footprint and its gaudy but it gets the job done.

The last plugin in the category I want to mention is Auto Social. This handy little plugin will automatically submit your posts to Del.icio.us for you using all your own tagging information. It makes a powerful end of day digest post when you combine it with the Del.icio.us Thingy.

There are some site specific plugin for Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, and Technorati. I however think it is far better to hand code these links for better layout control.

In the end there are other tools and new ones will come along, but with this list you can quickly turn an ordinary blog into a power blog

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/wordpress-2/plugins/must-have-wordpress-25-plugins/feed/ 45 http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/5-common-noobie-blogging-tips-that-are-wrong-most-of-the-time/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/5-common-noobie-blogging-tips-that-are-wrong-most-of-the-time/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:28:58 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=78 Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart.

The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio.

4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times.

3) Starting out with a free blog is the way to go. This might be true if you are just keeping a private journal, but if you ever want to make money on your blog, this is not necessarily the best advice you can get. Less than $20 can get you started right here on Zyon. After a month you will know if you going to give this up or keep at it. The longer you are established on your own server the better it is for your rankings. The longer you are on freebie blogs the harder it is to make the switch and the greater the detrimental effects to your blog there are.

2) Posting Frequency Doesn’t Matter. Unless you are writing a personal vanity blog detailing your life posting frequency does matter. Do you have to post every day? No. Do you need to post a couple of times a week minimum? Yes. In order to achieve any real following you need to post with some sort of frequency. If what you said in one post is interesting, but don’t have any sort regularity I might be kind and add your feed to the more than a two hundred and fifty I subscribe to, but if you don’t pick up the pace you will get relegated to the lowest priority folder, the check once a month if I have time category.

1) Only Write the Highest Quality Posts and Never Write Filler. This is fine when you have 25,000 daily feed readers, but when you are starting out regular posting is essential to getting momentum going. This is not to say write a crappy post, you shouldn’t do that either. When it comes right down to it, you should be able to come up with at least one good idea five times a week and knock out a few hundred words worth reading.

Filler posts may not be the best idea you have ever had. That doesn’t matter so long as you put some thought into it, made it readable, and did a good job with the SEO. There are many ways to come up with good filler posts, many of which are some form of linkbaiting. Trips Around the Blogosphere, Daily Del.icio.us Updates, or Twitter Digest Posts are just a few examples of this.

Not every post is going to interest every reader that is just a fact of life. Snobs will say a post is crap simply because they didn’t get anything out of it, but if you the blogger got something out of writing it, then you can guarantee someone else will to.

Remember to take good advice when you see it, but don’t be afraid to question the motives of those who are giving it to your.

I promised a post not so long back on how to make the most of Twitter for blogging.  In the mean time a couple of big name blogs ShoeMoney and ProBlogger have gotten into twitter pretty hard and can give you their takes on the networking with your fans side of it better than I can so I would suggest you read their tweeting adventures.

What I am going to bring to the table is a different take on the subject and one that has been doing well for me.  Using for those using WordPress there are several different plugins available to you, but I have two favorites, MyTwitter, which I am new too.  Then, there is the old reliable TwitterTools from Alex King.  Twitter tools does it all creates a digest post of your daily tweets, creates a post when you tweet, creates a tweet when you post, and gives you several configurable options.  The one problem it has is it only functions as a stupid widget making it about useless for me since I don’t want it in my sidebar.  This is where MyTwitter comes in.  I have only found this in the last few days, but it will allow you to place the content anywhere you want it.  I actually haven’t decided where I want it yet, but you can damned well believe it will be somewhere useful.

Okay I know some of you are probably thinking so what good is Twitter any how I run a couple of blogs that have absolutely nothing to do with my personal activities throughout the day. Well that goes back to one of the most important feature of TwitterTools, the ability to create a tweet when you post. If you make a couple of posts per blog a day and it creates a twit each time, you will notify every one of your followers you have posted something and if they are interested may go for a look even if they don’t normally read that blog. Furthermore you can use the tweet aggregate function to list you other posts on your other blogs to each and every reader creating a direct a passive stream of directed traffic. If you use the daily digest mode or create a post every time you tweet, you provide new content.

I prefer the digest mode on one of my blogs, but not all of them to avoid repetition. Using that along with AutoMeta which creates some of the meta information, SimpleTags which creates tags, the AutoSocial plugin which submits all my posts to Del.icio.us I get a full SEO friendly post that ends up drawing me organic traffic that I didn’t have to work for at all.

There has also been somewhat of another revolution in the Twitter market of recent days and that is the battle over desktop widgets. This is just one more place that people can see your blog links and effectively get to them. Expect as this battle heats up and innovations made almost daily, that this will become one more way to drive traffic to your site.

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/social-networking/the-power-of-twitter/feed/ 1 http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/serial-posts/earn-traffice-by-being-traffic-traffic-building-part-2/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/serial-posts/earn-traffice-by-being-traffic-traffic-building-part-2/#comments Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:12:03 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=17 Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

There are two really great programs that I am familiar and associated with BlogMad and BlogExplosion. You earn traffic to your site by surfing the sites they feed you. This is where writing good content and catchy post titles will really pay off. A person has to have your site up for 25 seconds in BlogMad and 30 seconds in BlogExplosion. before they can move on.

In my opinion if you want to start earning mad traffic you should join them both. you can easily surf through a lot of blogs while you you are watching TV or Listening to music and if you are a multitasker like th two computers at your desk there is no reason why you can’t always have a browser window open just for these sites. You won’t give a damn about most of the sites that you see, but some times you will see something that makes you go wow and that is worth the time spent. If you feel you must pick one of the two I would say go with BlogMad. BlogMad Favorites can be directed to your Del.icio.us account which makes sharing what you find a lot easier and as a source of future posts. You can find more on my use of social networking sites such as Del.icio.us and twitter for content creation in an upcoming post. General use of social networking to increase traffic in part three of this series.