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Blogging, RSS & FeedsWhy Wordpress is now my Blog of ChoiceThe more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn't yet support. Dear Web Diary!Blogging is hot and getting hotter, with more and more web logs (blogs) cropping up online by the day! What is a Blog? In Plain English PleaseIf you are fairly new to the Internet, you have probably heard the word ?Blog? flying around. But what is a blog? How does it work? And how can I use it on my website? These are all good questions, which I hope to answer for you. Why Journal Writing On The Web? Blogs Are Journals Giving Anyone An Identity, And An Awesome ForumJournal writing used to be a private, personal experience done late at night, scribbling hardly legible thoughts and daily occurrences down on paper amidst the haze of a barely lit room. When read over on a later date one could find connections and coincidences that sometimes brought deeper insights into the meaning of life. Also, old ideas could be rekindled that otherwise may have been forgotten forever. How Can RSS Feeds Help Your Online Business?So who should I use RSS Feeds? How can it help with my online business? Cash In Your Blog - 4 Ways to Profit From The Hidden Revenue In Your BlogMost webmasters and online business owners know that a blog can bring you additional revenue from advertising, and more traffic from search engines. Then there?s the additional benefit of having a great way to spark productive dialogue between you and your prospects. But did you know that your blog itself may be worth thousand of dollars to you in its present form? The day I learned that my blog held such hidden treasure was one of those happy accidents that can make life such a fun adventure. All I wanted to do was find out why some of my newsletter subscribers had not crossed over to my blog audience. In an informal poll, I found that many of the fans of my newsletter were overwhelmed with the amount of free information on my site, and felt that they?d never catch up to reading it all. This led to several discoveries about how I could find a way to make the information more accessible to them without disrupting the enjoyment of my feed subscribers. If your blog has export capabilities, you can use any of these techniques to generate revenue from your blog and make both your newsletter and blog subscribers deliriously happy. Method One: Monitor Your Popular Blog Topics as Ideas for Future Products As you begin to monitor which topics have the most responses, you?ll be able to see a pattern that tells you what your audience likes the most about your site. These themes often give you clues about what your next product could be. For example, as I continue to cover free Google tools, tips and news in my blog on Tuesdays, I?ve noticed that this is the day that I tend to have the most subscribers reading every entry. With that information I was able to create a free Christmas gift for my audience that they?ll be able to use as a reference guide. Your next best selling software idea, book or tool could come as a result of watching topic popularity, if you learn how to track audience response. Method Two: The Subscription Model When you?re blogging daily, sometimes several times a day, and much of the information on your blog continues to be useful months after you publish it, your audience is probably aware of this. Search engines may be doing a fine job of helping your fans find the information they?re looking for at your site, but you?ll also find that a cross-section of them would rather digest a periodic collection of your posts for use at a later time. Should you find this to be the case, instead of purging your archives, you can create a ?Best of? compilation on a weekly or monthly basis, and charge for electronic distribution. Or you could charge advertisers to be featured in these periodicals the same way you would a newsletter, and offer them to your audience at a discounted rate, as a premium version of your present ezine. Method Three: Turn Your Archives into an Ebook With a blog that focuses on a narrow, popular theme, you could be sitting on a gold mine and not even be aware of it. Whether your blog contains tips for newbies in your field, expert advice for veterans, or success strategies that build on each other, you could be in the position to supply a demand for needed information. There are a couple of tricks you?d have to learn to convert your archived blog posts into an ebook, but you?d be surprised about how easy this process can be. Method Four: Make Your Entire Blog Into a Printed Book I know what you?re thinking. ?Why would anyone pay for my blog as a book when it?s free at my site?? Under certain circumstances, you?d be surprised to find how many people would rather have a portable collection of your blog posts when the quality is consistent. The online version of your blog is the ultimate free trial. Many sites have been using this logic long before the web log came along to allow users to preview their services. For example, the sheer volume of the free traffic generation tips on my site was repeatedly described during my informal poll as ?overwhelming?. It?s one thing to try and read 2000 web pages in front of your computer, but it?s not as daunting to peruse a 400 page book in the comfort of your home. Converting your blog into a yearly volume may be a viable solution if consuming the amount of data in your archives is a daunting task. And there are ways to accomplish this that have no start-up costs. If you?re still not convinced that it?s not worth the set-up to convert your blog into a periodical, ebook or printed edition, consider this. On Monday morning I issued a press release regarding the transformation of my blog to a book, as a test to measure interest. It?s almost 4 a.m. Pacific time as I write this, and so far it has been read over 23,000 times, resulting in a distinct increase in general traffic, not to mention the best initial sales debut of any product at my site since this past summer. Just imagine what that kind of interest could do for your site - and how much money you may be leaving on the table right now. Making your blog available in other formats is worth a look. What is an RSS Aggregator or RSS Reader?I keep hearing about RSS, XML and RSS feeds. I just barely have a clue what they are, but when people then start talking about RSS aggregators, what are they talking about and why would I want one? Do you use an aggregator, and if so, which one? Tips for Better Blogging - Promote any Product or ServicePeople start blogs for all kinds of reasons. Ego. Political comment or agenda. Staying in touch with family and friends. Marketing. Why did you start your blog? The Key To Marketing With BlogsI?ve spent months answering questions from marketers about blogs and blogging and how they fit into the marketing mix. Still, 99% don?t understand the power of blogging. Top 9 Reasons Companies Should BlogBelow are the top 9 reasons why companies should blog. Blogging - Whats It All AboutA blog usually is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent come first) and each is uniquely identified by an anchor tag which is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it. How Blogs Can Be An Excellent Promotional ToolBlogs as an online promotional strategy if done right could save you huge dollars in reaching out to people. This is also a medium where you need have absolutely no dependence whatsoever on any professional help and you can do everything yourself. That is money saved right from the beginning. Blogs: Todays Internet Diary and Marketing ToolThe popular blogger.com owned by Google, Inc. has been around the internet for a while. Marketing With Blogs and RSS - The Hot New Tools of 2005In case you haven't heard, the net is buzzing with talk of blogging and RSS. Once the province strictly of people who got a kick out of publishing online diaries, and later of political and social commentarists, blogs and RSS are being adopted by the internet marketing community. To Blog Or Not To Blog - A Laymans ViewWe have now entered the world of blogs! Sounds kind of Harry Potterish, doesn't it?
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The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo. Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets. [?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?] [rss version="2.0"] [channel] [title]The Widget news feed[/title] [description]The latest news on widgets[/description] [link]http://www.widget.com/[/link] [image] [title]Widget News[/title] [url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url] [link>http://www.widget.com/[/link] [/image] The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below. [title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title] [description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description] [pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate] [link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link] [/item] You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items. Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag. [/channel] [/rss] I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification. Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file. That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.
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