OVERVIEW of RSS FEEDS

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (sometimes referred to as Rich Site Summary) is a means by which blogs can broadcast their content to a number of services and individuals easily. Some have gone so far as to argue that RSS is one of the chief reasons why blogging holds so much potential. An RSS feed collects the content of your post (depending on your software, you can opt to syndicate the entire post, just a headline, or some other combination) and then sends it in readable, plain text, to any of the targets you might choose.

Bloggers often submit their RSS feeds to popular blog directories, RSS directories and search engines. Users can then find the feeds in which they are interested and “subscribe to them,” reading them with an RSS feed reader. They may also simply read your feed and then hop on over to your site. RSS feeds are a great way of promoting your blog. There is also some evidence to suggest that RSS feeds can serve to boost the results of your blog in search engine rankings. They are also a wonderful way of getting noticed by at least one of the major search engines.

CREATING AN RSS FEED

Your blogging software will probably handle the process of creating an RSS feed for your blog automatically. For instance, those blogging at Blogger.com are automatically “given” an RSS feed (in Atom format) that they can burn and use. Other blogging services provide RSS feeds, as well.

If your blog service provider or software doesn’t automatically create an RSS feed for your blog, you can build one yourself. Those experienced with HTML may want to hand-code their RSS feed. Those of us who prefer a quicker solution can choose from a variety of software tools (many of which are freeware) to accomplish the goal.

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SUBMITTING YOUR RSS FEED

Having a feed will not do you much good if no one reads it! Thus, you must share your RSS feed with others. This can be done, in large measure, by using one of the multiple site ping services mentioned earlier. Pingoat, for instance, will request your RSS feed and will transmit it to a number of sites that aggregate these feeds.
You can also opt to submit your feed to any number of other RSS aggregators. A relatively long list of options, for instance, is currently available at http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm.

A great place to manage your RSS feed needs is at Feedburner, which can be found at http://www.feedburner.com. This free service provides you with a number of tools that can make sharing your RSS feed easier and more effective. It also offers free circulation traffic (just in case you want to know how many people are tracking your feed) and a lot of handy ways to help other subscribe to your feed.

You can skip manual submissions by using a service to submit your rss feeds to, I use an Automatic RSS Submission service that submits to over 200 rss directories.

RSS FEEDS AS A WAY INTO YAHOO

There is a now well-known technique that may enable your site to be discovered and indexed by the Yahoo search engine in record time. This technique makes use of your RSS feed and is a relatively simple thing to do.

You must have a free Yahoo account in order to do this. Create an account if you do not already have one. The sign up procedure is fast and simple.
After logging into your Yahoo account, go to the “My Yahoo” page. There you will find an option to add content to your page. You can add content in the form of your blog’s RSS feed. It is a simple and intuitive process that will only require you to have the URL of your RSS feed (which is easily locatable via your blogging software or service).

One you add your RSS feed to your content page, Yahoo will track the RSS feed in order to keep your page updated with developments. As a result, you have instructed Yahoo to find and note changes made to your blog.

This strategy has successfully allowed many blogs to find their way into Yahoo results in record time. It has been referred to as the Yahoo backdoor and is now a practice commonly used when launching a new blog. With greater use by more people, its effectiveness may have diminished somewhat (especially in terms of search engine results), but it still is the fastest way to crack into any of the big three search engines.

BONUS TIPS
1. Don’t forget to update! Make sure you remember to either ping using a mass-ping service or to manually alert RSS aggregators about your feed every time you update. Otherwise, you are losing some of the potential value of the feed.

2. Make your feed a moneymaker! Some bloggers who are particularly interested in making their blog pay may want to consider using their RSS feed as a vehicle for advertising. Google’s Adsense program has operated a program to allow some Adsense publishers place ads in their feeds and other means of feed advertising are growing.

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I just set up a blog in my health niche blog sites called Stages of Menopause. I’m working on setting up a network of my own blogs concerned with various subniches of the health niche. The idea is to create a network of blogs that has interconnections similar to that of a spiders web….the more blogs the better.

One of the easiest ways to develop a series of blogs is by purchasing a premade or preexisting blog.

You can find blogs for sale on ebay, look for auctions on blogs that fit your niche.

You can find blogs for sale on sites like digitalpoint.com or other marketing related websites and forums. Flipping blogs or flopping blogs has also become popular, just google “website flipping” or “blog flipping” and you’ll find sites and reports on how to start building and flipping your own blogs.

The first thing I do is to look at some of the forums to see what’s available (see below paragraph). After finding the appropriate niche, I look for some long tailed keywords using a tool like Micro Niche Finder or Keyword Research Pro. I develop a list of keywords and then I see which of those are available as a domain. Purchase the domain and then set it up as one of my domains on my reseller hosting, either Ultimate Marketing Center or Site5 Reseller Hosting ……both have been excellent with support second to none.

One of the places I constantly keep my eyes on is the Warrior Forum, in the WSO section you can find special offers for premade websites and blogs. Often times you can pick up a blog that is prepopulated with 10 to 20 PLR articles in a custom wordpress theme for less than $20. Remember, chances are the creator of the blog sold at least 10 of these sites and could be as many as 50 of these same sites on the internet. It really doesn’t matter how many are sold because 90% or more of those purchased won’t do anything with it, secondly those that do upload the site won’t make any changes to the site or articles at all. Here’s a list of things to do before and after purchasing one of these premade blogs.

1. make sure the site comes with plr articles you can edit
2. transferring wordpress blogs can be difficult, make sure the creator has a clear cut set up pdf or video, and make sure you’ll be able to contact them after you purchase in case you run into trouble during the installation…..ask these questions in the open, as in the forum environment….if the seller is short with you….don’t expect much help
3. if you are planning to flipping the site make sure you have the proper rights or license
4. change any and all affiliate links
5. edit any optin forms to your own autoresponder
6. find long tail keywords that correspond with the content of each article or blog post
7. Rewrite the title of each blog post, be sure to include the long tail keyword…this is important!
8. Rewrite each blog post so that it is unique, be sure to include the long tail keyword that was used in the title, in the blog post at least 3 times
9. add an image to each blog post, make sure you use the long tail keyword in the name of the image and in the alt tag
10. publish the post
11. after publishing, go back and submit the blog post to social bookmarking and networking sites
12. pick out 10 more long tail keywords and write or edit 10 more articles for blog posts and submit
13. chances are you will have a very healthy piece of virtual real estate otherwise known as VRE

There’s much more you can do with these sites, but if that were all you did and you did this 5 or 10 times a month you would create a nice little network of blogs that would be valuable for all kinds of different purposes besides a monthly number of clicks from Goggle

You could drip feed articles if you have them.

You could build the blog further by any number of autoposting or autoblogging methods.

Bottom line, at least for me, is that finding a prebuilt blog saves me some time….If you find one in the niche you’re interested in, or want to develop it’s a quick way to get some content up quick. You can always develop it latter.

Of course it will take some time to get traffic to the site, I use Auto Social Poster plugin a well kept secret used by so called gurus for quick spidering, fast indexing and constant traffic, its well worth the price because your blog will get indexed and spidered quickly. I also use Slick Auto Poster and Article Stalker for autoposting full lenght keyword rich articles. Once established, I’ll add Google Adsense, Ebay, Amazon and add an optin form…..I might do only one of these or all of them some of these plugins allow you to use your keywords in the plugin to pull in relevant products or articles when autoblogging.

My goal is simple, get the site to produce $10 a month. I keep it simple. I know if I can get 10 sites to produce $10 a month, I’m making $100 a month. That’s not much money but it’s a very real number. Now all you need to do is expand your efforts, shoot for 100 sites a month making $10. Maybe it takes me a year to do that, but I’ll be making $1000 a month on autopilot. I know from experience some of those sites won’t make $10 a month…..some will make less, some will make a lot more!

Here’s an example of one of the sites I purchased on the warrior special offers forum, a blog on “menopause“. All I did was create a new header and install according to the authors instruction. Take a look at Stages of Menopause

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When most people hear PPC, they think Google Adwords. And for good reason. . .In the US, Google leads the top PPC sites and now controls 74% of all searches in the US. Yahoo holds 11% of the market share and MSN 9% of the pie. The remaining 6% goes to all the other search engines combined. While Google is probably the best place to start with your PPC campaigns, there are reasons to consider some of the other search engines, if not now, then later on. Why start with google?

First of all, it’s extremely easy to get started with Google and the initial one-time fee is minimal. Another benefit of using google is that it’s very easy to track which keywords are converting and which ads are getting the best click-through rates. Also, the sheer amount of traffic you’ll get with google is the main reason you want to start there. If you can’t get the results you want with Google Adwords, you most likely won’t be able to do it with any of the other search engines either.

When should you consider other PPC Sites and which ones should you choose?

Once you make some money with Google AdWords, move your most profitable keywords and best ads over to the other PPC sites. MSN is definitely on the rise and currently matches or betters the search results that Google does today.

MSN is also spending about 20 times more than Google on advertising so it’s likely that it will win more market share from Google over the next year and continue to do so. As with Google Adwords, the initial start-up fee with MSN is minimal, making it easy to get started.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is generally considered to be a little more expensive but offers fantastic tutorials and support and provides detailed reporting tools to help you track your ads’ performances. If you want fast results and you’re willing to pay top dollar for a well-known site with a worldwide reputation, Yahoo! Search Marketing is the place to advertise.

7Search is another up and coming PPC Site with traffic reaching up to 1.5 billion searches a month. The company also claims better Return On Investment than either Google or Yahoo! because of their high quality traffic sources. The initial start-up fee is $25.00.

Why move to other top PPC sites?

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Perry Marshall is the Foremost Authority on PPC or Pay Per Click
and Google Adwords, Study His Google Adwords Techniques
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The advantages of using Google Adwords are clearly ease and popularity among information seekers all over the world. If you are new to PPC, you’ll definitely have to start advertising with the very low searched keywords on Google Adwords because the competition will be extremely high for those terms that most widely sought online. It’s getting harder and harder to make a low bid on Google Adwords and still come up in the top rankings. Google is also frowned upon often by its advertisers for its changing of rules without much (any) notice. This is what companies who own 75% of the market share have the luxury of doing.

These top PPC Sites should eventually all be included in your marketing plans for the most thorough coverage and results.

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One of the most successful online business models is the membership business model. Before internet marketers began to use Wordpress, they were using membership scripts on static webpages. Some marketers began to make big bucks, others achieved minor success but you don’t have to be a Wall Street Investor to know that monthly recurring income will beat the pants off a single sale any day!

If you’ve been marketing online for a number of years then you know of the mass pilgrimage from static websites over to the Wordpress platform. Most memberships have stuck with their static sites and membership scripts….simply because it works. Plus migrating a membership over to a new platform could end up costing big bucks, be full of bugs and cause you to lose your members….so why bother. Just keep cashing those checks>:)

Well, there have been membership plugins for almost the last 2 years. These plugins were clunky, odd to use and often times just didn’t work. Thankfully it looks like today’s wordpress membership plugins are caught up to their old static membership scripts. These new plugins do some amazing things.

I memtioned in another post about the Wishlist Membership Plugin, a wordpress membership plugin that is probably one of the most powerful plugins I’ve seen to date, because it can do everything short of bake a cake, it can become a little awkward and difficult to use…..especially for the newbie. Another negative about Wishlist is the cost, by far one of the most expensive out there. If you’re in need of everything Wishelist does and your pocket book is stuffed with cash, I invite you to check it out. Seriously, I condone the investment of the best tools possible to build your business, however, often times, finances dictate what type of tools you can invest in.  I’m sure the competition will cause a rethinking of their pricing. But, it you want a membership plugin that can do just about everything under the sun, give the Wishlist Membership Plugin a look.

I started this post because I was excited and wanted to tell you about one very inclusive and affordable wordpress membership plugins called Wordpress eMember Membership Plugin. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been searching for a preferably free membership plugin, however, I found those to be generally lacking in more than one category. In specific I want the membership plugin to add the new member to one of my Aweber Autoresponder Lists. I couldn’t find a free one to do that. In fact, the less expensive ones won’t touch that function.

Once I started reading about all the functions Wordpress eMember membership plugin would do I really got excited….too many to list here, but it does handle the Autoresponder dilema. It’s super affordable at $27 dollars and I’m so excited to see that it will add new members to my selected Aweber Autoresponder list. We all know that building a list is one of the most important aspects of internet marketing. Once a visitor becomes a customer or a member, they will develop a  relationship and trust with you and consequently they are much more likely make a purchase, join another membership or take your advise. That’s why starting a free or $1 membership to access some type of valued content could be the beginning or your own online riches…..keep in mind, your list is a valued asset and don’t blast them with some offer every other day but deliver quality content or suggest they purchase a product only if you’ve had experience and can honestly recommend it.

What’s really cool is that the folks at www.tipsandtricks-hq.com have put together a series of related plugins that integrate with each other. This is so exciting, I can’t wait to give it them a try, they have an estore plugin….take all those ebooks and set up a store….or deliver your products, they have an affiliate plugin and a handfull of other plugins that all seem to be able to be integrated. I want to be upfront with you, I haven’t purchased any of these yet, but have done the research and as soon as I finish writing this post I plan on ordering the membership plugin…although I really would like to try the estore plugin but then again….the affiliate plugin looks like it would be of big help to me. Anyway, this plugin is integrated with other plugins these folks product….let me tell you just a few of the things that the Wordpress eMember Membership Plugin can do:

1. You can create various membership levels including a free
2. Selectively protect the full or a section of an article. Create different membership levels and select what content (eg. posts, pages) can be viewed by each membership level.
3. Very easy to use and it integrates nicely into your existing site. No site redesign or any changes necessary.
4. It is pre-integrated with the WordPress Affiliate Software Plugin. So if you decide to boost your membership signups by introducing an Affiliate Program (award affiliates that redirect visitors who become your member) later then all you have to do it activate the other plugin.
5. Fully Integrated with WP eStore Fully integrated with the WordPress eStore (WordPress Shopping Cart) plugin.

There appears to be a few negatives depending on your viewpoint. Although the plugins are very affordable, they appear to be single user license which means only one site per plugin, there is a multi-site license but I couldn’t find a developers license. I’m only guessing on this one, but I haven’t seen this company around until now which means they are fairly new to the plugin scene and there’s probably not enough history to determine whether their support is going to exist and exactly how good it will be….correct me on this if I’m wrong.

Despite those small negatives, these guys have put together an awesome group of plugins….if they work as good as they say, you can greatly expand they use of any wordpress site…..from membership site to complete ecommerce site! Just imagine what you could do with all the eproducts you’ve stashed away all these years….if setting up an estore or estore/membership site is as easy as they say,  you’ll be able to make good use of the products you have and get good materials into hands of those that need it.

Don’t forget, if you develop sites for others of offline markets such as brick and mortar stores, you now have the ability to easily set up an estore for your clients. Better yet, introduce them to the concept of online memberships and the benefits these have for promoting and distributing their products!

Once more, you can find the plugins at these links:

1. Wordpress eMember Membership Plugin
2. Wordpress Affiliate Platform Plugin
3. Wordpress eStore Plugin

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Learning how to customize wordpress for small business applications is essential for anyone working with wordpress. Wordpress marketing has become one of the most popular blogging tools available on the internet today. What a lot of people do not realize though is that it is also a powerful Content Management System that is able to be used for more than just blogging.  When you use wordpress you have the ability to either a blog or use it as a static website, you can easily choose which type of wordpress design would be more effective for your application.

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging tool but you no longer have to use it just for blogging anymore. The fact that it is open source and you can modify it beyond your wildest dreams with wordpress plugins and changing themes not  to mention anyone knowing a little php and html can jump right into the code and start hacking away, gives wordpress so many options that I don’t think any blogging or cms platform will ever catch up. Learning how to customize wordpress for your small business will open a whole new world for you. With just a few updates here and there you can also use it for your website and you can either in conjunction with a blog or no blog at all. Just the fact that Wordpress was once originally designed for a blogging platform gives Wordpress some compelling advantages. It is designed for easy publishing and changing your content whenever it is needed.  There are also other advantages that are great for small business owners as well.

Using WordPress For Your Small Business

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1. First of all Wordpress is SEO optimized. There are a few adjustments that you will need to make but overall there are several SEO benefits that Wordpress provides to you for free.  This saves you considerable amount of time and effort that is usually needed for providing a properly SEO organized wordpress blog. Search Engine Optimization scares away some of the most experienced marketers, however, seo plugins for wordpress make it easy even for the newbie!

2. Another great advantage of  Wordpress for small business owners is that the content is easily updated and you will not even have to know any HTML to get it done either.  You can easily create new pages or edit your existing pages using a simple rich text editor. This is another great way for you to save money when you are first creating your site. Wordpress is the favorite platform for those doing offline marketing.  As the website developer, you can easily set up a wordpress blog for any business and then give the owner simple permissions to add blog posts only.

3. There are also thousands of people in the internet world that create extensions of the Wordpress program.  Understanding how to customize wordpress can be learned in Rockstar Wordpress Designer…..and even the novice web designer can pick up a couple of tricks that will allow you to customize wordpress themes! Just think how many free themes and ratings, among hundreds of other options, are available to you for free.  For those working with a tight budget, you will not have to pay the hefty price you would normally have to for a web designer because these extensions will allow you to do it for yourself. I found 2 sources for very professional looking wordpress business themes at Gabfire Themes and StudioPress, they both have amazing flexibility and I would probably say they aren’t for the novice wordpress user.

4. If you happen to run into a problem or wish to add on custom features, it is very easy for you to find support as there are thousands of  Wordpress developers available on the net. All you need to do is type in Wordpress support in your favorite search engine and you will be amazed at the results that you will get.  Although if you’re like me, you really want to understand how to customize wordpress themes so you don’t have to pay someone else!

5. The final benefit for small business owners is that Wordpress is easy to install. There are many companies that also offer help with your quick install to get your site up and running in no time. They will install needed plugins and help you on your way to getting your first blog post online.

As you can see there are several different reasons why Wordpress would benefit your small business. Gabfire themes has a variety of themes for any local business or local business directory, while Brian Gardner’s StudioPress offers some amazing business themes that can make any one man operation look like a major corporation and make a major corporation  look like a million bucks! The key fact all revolves around either you knowing how to customize wordpress or hiring a designer who confidently knows  how to customize wordpress themes.

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One of the biggest questions is, “How to customize wordpress?” Wordpress is probably best known around the internet business world as a blogging software but in reality it is much more than that. It also has amazing earning potential capabilities as well as being a complete content management system. If you use the correct plugin, you can literally turn your wordpress blog into any type of site!  If you are an affiliate marketer it can mean increased productivity. Wordpress also features less site maintenance that you will have to perform over time.  If you are still trying to decide if wordpress marketing is still for you stop and take some time to think of the following tips.

How To Customize Wordpress By Understanding Wordpress

Flexibility:
Wordpress is a very flexible program to work with. No matter if you are choosing to use a post or promoting a product wordpress is able to do both of these.  You also have the option to choose whether you will allow comments on your product page which will allow user generated content on your website which will appear in the form of reader’s comments.  It will also allow you to further customize by choosing if you would prefer to have either a static generated page so that you are allowed to highlight certain products or your mailing lists.

Themes:
If you’re asking yourself how to customize wordpress, then you should know the biggest way is by changing themes because you can literally change the entire look of your blog. You need to remember you only have one chance to impress the visitors to your site. If they are not impressed they will simply not return. With the wordpress software you have the ability to upload the theme of your choice and click a button and you’re done. This saves a lot of time when you consider the option of picking theme after theme just to find the right one which is very time consuming.

You can literally make your blog look like a newspaper by using a Wordpress Newspaper Theme!

Or you can easily turn your blog into an online magazine by using a wordpress magazine theme.

The capabilities contained in word press make modifying your site simple and saves you loads of time.  You will be able to customize the look of your wordpress and determine whether your visitors will look at the home page, a category page, or a single entry page. The choice is yours with a simple click of your mouse.  This gives you the power to optimize each area of your site which will lead to higher conversion rates.

Plugins:
Another answer to “How to customize wordpress?” is by using any of the 1000’s of wordpress plugins available. To some, the basic “out of the box” wordpress blog is considered a lightweight software program therefore it does not have a lot of capabilities that comes with it.  You can however add plugins to the software.  With these plugins it gives the wordpress program the ability to do a number of different things including, create mailing lists, create affiliate links and track those links, and even allows you to import the affiliate product feeds directly to your site. There’s even a new wordpress membership plugin that allows you to create one of the most advanced memberships available with a couple of clicks of your mouse……think of the income possibilities with a membership plugin like this!

There’s a plugin that will allow you to use all those PLR Articles you have laying around on your hard drive and with automatically post articles to your blog!

You can even create a ton of content for your blog by importing the text of an entire PLR or public domain book and use a plugin called ebook import to automatically turn that book into a predetermined number of blog posts…..how’s that for a plugin!

Author Management

One important factor of running your affiliate marketing site is learning when and how to delegate. Wordpress allows multiple authors to have the authority to easily have other people create, as well as add content to your site, without having to give out your personal administrative information to these other authors. This feature limits the authority of outside authors and prevents them from literally taking over your blog while giving you the freedom to increase the quality and quantity of content in your blog.  They will only get enough authority to get their job done and that is it.

Huge Community

Since wordpress is so popular, there are many people that are always asking themselves how to customize wordpress. Consequently, there are people all over the world who develop add-ons to the wordpress software. These add-ons can include new themes and plugins among others. Some of these people also understand the intricate problems associated with wordpress and will be able to assist you if you would happen to encounter an error. Along with the huge community around the world there are also books that will help you get started with installing and how to use the wordpress software effectively. For instance if you want to learn how to build your own theme, you could read a book on How to Build A Wordpress Theme!

As you can see there are a variety of benefits that you can gain from using wordpress software.  What was once used for blogging only has now grown into a very powerful program with a tremendous amount of flexibility so you can create a site that will draw in the traffic and make money for you.

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