Whatever your reason, you should get started now - or get back to blogging as the case may be. Here’s some motivating enlightenment that you may find surprising.

Reason # 1 that you aren’t blogging - You don’t realize how huge the benefits are, and how much they may outweigh any monetary or time costs involved.

I think number one may partly the fault of people like me, who have a foot in the marketing arena, and don’t explain the idea in detail.

We tend to tell you how great blogging is, but we don’t tell you why, or better yet, show you. Or we tell you how to get the best results with your blog, but don’t tell you where to start. Let’s talk about some of the basic facts.

If you’ve ever dreamed of going from getting 10 hits a month to getting a few dozen visitors a day from search engines, blogging can make it possible, if you do it right. The structure of a blog, and the fact that most of them automatically generate content feeds, also make them the best food for your friendly neighborhood search engine spider.

If you would like to have visitors come back to your site over and over again, until they buy, you may want to be a blogger. An informative blog that engages your audience shortens the sales cycle. It also creates a courtship period. They can subscribe to your thoughts, see if they like you, even get to know you a little.

People buy from people they like. I don’t remember who said it first, but I’ve learned that it’s the truth.

If your visitors don’t feel like they are getting a personality vibe from you, they are often less likely to buy. Vibe = buy. Remember that, and that blogs make it easy for you to vibe.

If you’d like to create new targeted search engine pages for your site without needing to hand-code a new page, or fire up your HTML editor every time, you may enjoy blogging. You log in to your blog admin panel, type your thoughts, proofread, press publish.

Presto. You’re a blogger.

If you’d like free one-way links back to your site that contain your lucrative keywords, blogging helps with that too.

Even if you’ve made a mess of your SEO efforts, or been the unsuspecting victim of an algorithm change, as long as you aren’t banned by a search engine, blogging can help bring you back into top results. Because they have a search engine friendly architecture, and can make use of your keywords automatically, without being gratuitous, they are an easy way to get into a search engine and stay in.

Reason #2 That you aren’t blogging - You think it’s hard and expensive.

Granted, especially if you’re busy, or have a medium sized to large business, it may be in your best interest to hire one of the few consultants that works on these types of issues.

But if you’re a small business owner or home business owner with an online element, you can get away with firing up a free blog and paying for an inexpensive custom template if you can’t install one on your own. Most blog consultants will do all the keyword research, etc for you, so that all you’ll have to do is log in and blog.

Many of the most common blog software systems are free or inexpensive, especially when weighed against the cost of only using paid methods to attract visitors.

Reason #3 That you aren’t blogging - You don’t think of yourself as a writer.

Not only can you get away with a few paragraphs, you don’t have to write in professional-speak, or use industry jargon to blog. By nature, blogging is done in a casual, conversational tone.

And your blog posts don’t have to be long article-type entries like mine are. I’m used to writing articles, and I’m just naturally verbose. My audience is used to my mini-brain dumps, just as your blog readers will likely be happy with, or adapt to, whatever your style is. Your audience will be thrilled with a few paragraphs every day, as long as they’re informative and consistent.

So take the plunge. Start blogging today. If you’re already a blogger and didn’t see the benefits the first time around, try making it a part of your routine - and have a little fun. Give it time to work for you.

You’ll be glad you did.

Tinu is a web site promotion specialist who writes about many different ways to get more visitors to your web site. If you want better search engine results, more visitors and return traffic she invites you to take a free ecourse on blogging at http://RescueYourBlog.com .

What’s wrong with using a web site for conducting your online business? How can Blogs help and why should I need one anyway?

Combining a website and a Blog however offer a number of superior advantages in terms of traffic generation, marketing and efficiency which a stand-alone website cannot do.

(a) Automatic push-button publishing.

Blogs are the easiest and cheapest way to have an online presence. For example, if you’re using Blogger, your Blog is hosted free by Blogger. Blogs allow you to publish your website without the need to know about any technical or programming issues such as HTML, FrontPage, FTP and so on.

Blogs provide a simple editorial interface. All you need to do is write your content, and publish it just by clicking the ‘publish’ button in most cases, and you’re done.

(b) Fosters relationship building, trust and ’stickyness’

Unlike websites, which are static, Blogs allows interaction between you and your readers. Blogs have a commenting function, and if turned on, it allows readers and visitors to post their comments, thoughts or opinions to a particular article you have written.

Constant interaction with your readers builds a feeling of community and ’stickyness’ factor. You can then recommend products more easily to them, and they would be more ready and willing to accept your product or services.

(c) Increase search engine ranking

Almost every major search engine has a software program called a ‘bot’ that searches or ’spiders’ websites online to find new content which it can then bring back to update the search engine databases.

Basically what this means is the more frequently you update your site, the more frequently the search engine ‘bot’ will visit your site, and this helps to boost your search engine rankings.

If you make regular postings to your Blog, you can be sure that search engines will visit your Blog again and again.

You can then place links of your other websites in your Blog and these will get indexed quickly by the search engines.

Of course you could also update your existing web site with new content, but you would have to go through a more technical process, that of using an HTML editor or FrontPage and uploading through FTP and so on.

(d) Free listing in Google, Yahoo and MSN

The traditional way of getting your website listed in these three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN is slow and inefficient.

A listing in Yahoo directory alone would cost you $299.

However, with the inclusion of RSS feeds by these search engines, you can now gain a ‘backdoor’ listing which is legal and free. If you have an RSS feed, you can have it included in Yahoo and MSN and your website will be immediately listed in these major search engines within 24 hours!

My videos shows you the step-by-step process on how to do this.

e) Syndication Power

The most powerful feature of a Blog is its syndication function. Blogs can be turned into RSS feeds, and most Blogging service providers have this built-in function.

It is just a matter of turning it on from within your account.

Once it’s turned into an RSS feed, you can syndicate your Blog contents by:

? Submitting to the major RSS directories and search engines like Yahoo and MSN, gaining free exposure and free traffic

? Allow other website owners to publish your feed on their sites, again, getting free traffic you otherwise will not have

? Gain new readers, subscribers and potential clients by letting them subscribe to your RSS feed via a newsreader

http://www.marketing-rampage-with-blogs-and-rss.com

Brandon is the author of the “Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS” Videos. He’ll show you businesses strategies to getting more highly responsive visitors and more sales to your website without additional advertising costs, as well as increasing search engine rankings and obtaining quick listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN, by using Blogs and RSS.

Before we go into the details you may want to brush up on your understanding of RSS. This will help you fully appreciate and fully understand the issues involved.

I am glad this conversation is happening now as it needs to be made clear what fair use of RSS feeds actually means. There may be webmasters who are republishing RSS feeds in all innocence at the moment not realising the furore that is going on around them with regards to their republishing activities. I would like to help clear up any misunderstandings that surround RSS republishing.

Being an RSS publisher myself who is considering republishing other authors RSS feeds I would like to make sure I am not treading on any toes. I am basing the following RSS republishing etiquette on the good practice that Rok Hrastnik has enthused.

If you wish to republish an RSS feed then you should first consult the publisher with your intentions. This would be an email to the author stating how you wish to reuse their feed and the page or pages the feed will be republished on and the attributions you will make. You will need to clarify some points. If the authors feed contains ads then will they be republished? Will you be monetizing the authors work by placing ads on your republished page? To avoid conflict these issues need to be sorted out.

The general guidelines Rok Hrastrnik has provided state that the article title must link back to the original article. If the RSS feeds contains a complete article only an excerpt, Rok suggests 100 to 200 words, can be republished. A link should be provided to the article source, the website of the original publisher.

Further to this it is suggested that no archives are kept on the republished site and no full articles are used. I would suggest permission is sought from the original author if you wish to keep an archive on your site.

You can follow this discussion further at PR meets the WWW and Micro persuasion.

Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

RSS feeds can be setup in a very short time, literally a few minutes! Simply put, an RSS feed is basically a text file with a couple HTML looking tags. There is an area with the information about the feed, then individual blocks of code for each article or piece of content being syndicated. It may sound bad now, but I assure you it’s very simple to setup and I’ll give you a full working example by the end of this article!

The first thing you need to do is to create a file that you want to call your RSS feed. It can be anything, the name isn’t important. For this article I will call it “cool_feed.xml”

All the following code will be placed inside the “cool_feed.xml” file. This file is the primary file you will use, in fact outside of one minor modification to other pages in your website you will use this file exclusively for sending out your feed updates.

The above block of code as you can see is very similar to HTML, all it is doing is telling people the version of XML you are using, and the version of RSS you are conforming to, as you can see this is XML v1.0 and RSS v0.91.

The next thing we need to do is setup your “channel” which is the name of your feed, and a description of it. In addition to the description it gives some contact information, the language and the website you run.

Your Website Title http://YourWebsite.com/ What is your RSS Feed about? en-us Your Copyright Line Your@email.com Your@email.com

As I’ve mentioned several times before, it’s similar to HTML in that it has an open and closing block after each parameter. But you also may have noticed there isn’t a closing block for CHANNEL. That is because it is sort of the equivalent of the “BODY” block in HTML, it will do it’s close near the very end. Actually, we opened the RSS block up in the first block of code I gave you also, where we set the version, that is the equivalent to the HTML block and will be the very last thing closed at the end of the XML file.

Article Number One http://YourWebsite.com/Article_Number_One.html 1-3 sentences about your article

This ITEM block is your first article, every time you want to add an update you just create another ITEM block similar to this one. It simply has an article title, link to where the article is on your website, and a description field, which is normally 1-3 sentences long.

These are the final closing blocks of code for the channel and RSS blocks that you setup in the top of the file. You must have these blocks of code at the very end, in this order. I will give a couple of links to websites that can check your code to make sure it works properly.

Once you have saved all that code in your file, the next thing we need to do is modify your website. This set is NOT required by any means, but it tells your users web browsers that you have an RSS feed, if their browser supports viewing them.

All you have to do is add the following line to the HEAD field of your website:

Congratulations, you are the proud owner of a brand new RSS feed!

Ken Dennis http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/

RSS is a lightweight XML design with a very easy format, very similar to HTML tags. Simply put, an RSS feed is a file that has a title, description, and link to your content. Implementing an RSS feed on your website takes a very short time and is a great way to drive traffic to your website. But don’t think that article writers are the only ones who can benefit from this form of information dissemination, it has many great practical purposes.

RSS gives you the ability to have a list produced that can be integrated in part, or whole in to another website. RSS gives you the ability to have other websites have up to date, accurate information from you online in seconds. Headline news, technical articles, website updates, security alerts, or your favorite food recipes are just a few of the things that you can syndicate!

You would be surprised at how many websites have RSS feeds that you may not have noticed, generally you can identify a website that syndicates their content by a graphic (normally at the bottom) that says “RSS” or “XML” or identifies in other ways that their articles are syndicated.

In addition to people receiving your syndicated articles over websites, there are many websites who keep up to date databases of RSS feeds. You can search their websites for your favorite topics and see what feeds provide information you like, then have it mailed to you, or browse it online. In addition web browsers such as Mozilla FireFox have introduced the live bookmark concept, which allows you to add dynamic content such as RSS feeds to your favorites, this creates a folder in your favorites and that folder polls your favorite feeds from time to time to keep you up to date all the time!

Really Simple Syndication is a great way to get way for webmasters to provide a valuable service to their users, other websites that may rely on them, and increase your traffic and reputation.

Ken Dennis http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/

Sunday morning, I noticed a sale. Idly, I scanned my logs to see where the buyer had found me.

It was from Yahoo! Now that may not seem surprising, except… I had not been listed in Yahoo! before.

Curious, I did a Yahoo! Search for my domain name… and almost fainted in shock! There were 123 of my pages listed - many of them in the top 10 ranks on my best keywords.

My RSS feed had been listed within 48 hours - and since my other pages were linked from it, they had all been indexed by Yahoo! just as quickly. And for free!

Since then I have heard many others share similar experiences. It is no fluke. RSS is H-O-T. And search engines LOVE it.

So what is RSS? An acronym for Really Simple Syndication, it is a web language format designed to help syndicate content across different sources.

RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS feeds provide headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.

The rise in RSS popularity, specially among marketers, has many reasons. Email filters and new legislation have lowered the effectiveness of email marketing. Content syndication in many different ways is gathering momentum. And fresh, frequently updated content is the very essence of the Web.

How can you use RSS feeds in your marketing? Is there a way to turn RSS feeds into profits?

Absolutely. Here are some ideas:

# Beat email filters. Ask your subscribers, prospects and clients to sign up to your RSS feed along with your email newsletter. If the ezine gets blocked, they’ll still get your RSS feed.

# Spread the word. Offer your new, valuable content to many other ‘lazy’ website owners - in return for getting extra exposure of your name and brand to their audiences.

# Get listed on search engines. No one knows how long this ‘honeymoon’ will last. But ride the wave - and get into search engines quickly, inexpensively - by submitting your RSS feeds to them.

# Use the first-mover advantage. Dedicated RSS directories are mushrooming. Make sure your RSS feed is indexed in them and you could future-proof your business. Imagine if you were one of the first sites to be indexed in Google or Yahoo 5 years ago!

# Offer your readers new content. Keep creating your own content - but also use RSS feed syndication to offer other people’s content to your list. Less pain, less strain, more gain.

And that’s not all. On a bet, I sat down and listed 41 different ideas to profit from RSS feeds. I’m sure you can do it too - and turn the hot new revolution in online communication into a money magnet for your ebusiness.

Happy blogging.

About The Author

Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian has been marketing with blogs for over 3 years. His free 5 day RSS Primer explains the basics of RSS Marketing - sign up here: http://www.RSS-Marketing.com He is also author of ‘How To Profit From RSS Feeds - 41 Quick & Easy Ideas For RSS Feed Publishers’ - http://www.RSS-Marketing.com/book.htm

Personal and business blogs: What is difference between two?

There is not much of difference between personal and business blogs visually but there is a fine difference between them in terms of reputation and brand attached.

Business blogs should be well planned before hand. Companies can’t afford to just walk away after launching their blog. Business blog has to be successful. Constant and consistent posts are the rule of the game. Blogsphere is full of best writers and faster one learns their rule, better for them. Companies can’t just rely on the fact that they are market leaders in their business so they will be successful with their blogs too.

The postings on business blog should be open and should portray personality of the writer and the company. The postings on business blogs should be very informal, and should be written in first person voice. Posts should be informative and relevant with an expert touch to it.

Business Blogs and it content:

According to search engine optimizers, “Content is King”. Indeed this is true for websites but not for a blog. Blog is all about writing with a particular voice and personality. A lot of people would like the style and would stick to the blog with regular visits. A lot of them will hate it and would never return.

Content for a business blog should be written in a strong voice with high consistency in quality. It becomes somewhat difficult to maintain quality with regular postings, but no choice. A few bad or substandard posts and regular visitors to the blog will fly off.

Important

Don’t hammer your visitors every time with posts like how great is your product and so on. Add some funny incidences or bit of humor to your postings. Talk something about how employees enjoyed drinks in a party organized at particular department. Add some lighter moments in between posts.

Amitabh Shukla
(Personal blog for the author is at http://seoexpertindia.tblog.com)

Before we go into the details you may want to brush up on your understanding of RSS. This will help you fully appreciate and fully understand the issues involved.

I am glad this conversation is happening now as it needs to be made clear what fair use of RSS feeds actually means. There may be webmasters who are republishing RSS feeds in all innocence at the moment not realising the furore that is going on around them with regards to their republishing activities. I would like to help clear up any misunderstandings that surround RSS republishing.

Being an RSS publisher myself who is considering republishing other authors RSS feeds I would like to make sure I am not treading on any toes. I am basing the following RSS republishing etiquette on the good practice that Rok Hrastnik has enthused.

If you wish to republish an RSS feed then you should first consult the publisher with your intentions. This would be an email to the author stating how you wish to reuse their feed and the page or pages the feed will be republished on and the attributions you will make. You will need to clarify some points. If the authors feed contains ads then will they be republished? Will you be monetizing the authors work by placing ads on your republished page? To avoid conflict these issues need to be sorted out.

The general guidelines Rok Hrastrnik has provided state that the article title must link back to the original article. If the RSS feeds contains a complete article only an excerpt, Rok suggests 100 to 200 words, can be republished. A link should be provided to the article source, the website of the original publisher.

Further to this it is suggested that no archives are kept on the republished site and no full articles are used. I would suggest permission is sought from the original author if you wish to keep an archive on your site.

You can follow this discussion further at PR meets the WWW and Micro persuasion.

Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

General surveys undertaken on blogs and bloggers shows a rising trend in blogging. A parallel platform for literary endeavor, the blogs are overthrowing the traditional journalistic norms. Publishing of news and views no longer remains the privilege of an elite minority. Anybody and everybody is free to get in touch and explore the writer within himself. The anamorphic nature of the human soul is best reflected in the blogs.

A survey in the United States brought out a startling fact the 30% of the surveyed people read blogs. Also, 52% of the surveyed people advocate equal journalistic rights and freedom for the blogs. And the most striking fact is that 31% of the surveyed people revealed that they found blogs to be more credible than the newspapers.

The growing popularity of blogs can be gauzed from the fact that Yahoo, Google, MSN, Rediff and all the other bigwigs of the cyber world are experimenting with blogs and bloggers. Both free and paid blog hoisting sites have come up which offers a plethora of tools to make blogging a breeze.

MSN has even gone to the extent of making a common ‘passport’ database across all its services. So now, a MSN user can use his own personal ‘id’ across MSN messenger, Spaces and hotmail. Also, MSN has integrated its Spaces with MSN Messenger 7.0. The users of MSN Messenger 7.0 will have a tab labeled ‘gleams’ which will inform them when their contacts have updated their individual blogs.

Recent statistics from MSN shows that MSN has 170,000 daily blog updates. This number is huge considering the fact that most of the bloggers do not update their blogs on a daily basis.

The Literature of the new era is no longer limited to books. From Poems to Features, from Humor to Short Stories, everything can be found in the blogs.

Though good blogs are a trifle to find, yet close scrutiny will reveal every blog to be good in its own personal aspect. After all, blogs are a slice of the blogger’s life and every one’s life is a good source of learning experience.

This also opens up the teaching value of blogs. Blogs can be a mirror of life, culture and society. What can be a better teacher than one with a plethora of experiences to offer on a silver platter?

Abhishek Sarkar works as an Executive Content Developer and Analyst. He is currently associated with Alpha Blog. http://alphablog.rediffblogs.com/

Now for those of you who aren’t quite up to speed on “RSS” here’s the basic definition — RSS is an acronym for “Real Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, and the .XML extension is the format used for distributing your news headlines via the Web, which is known as “Syndication”.

“Syndication” is where the TRUE power of RSS is unleashed, getting your message or information across the web in an INSTANT to websites, your subscribers and/or readers.

Why is this such Good News for website owners who publish content on a Daily or Weekly basis for there audiences?

Simple.

By having “RSS” plugged into your website with targeted RSS feeds you’ll now have an endless supply of Fresh targeted content delivered to your website for your visitors and/or subscribers 24/7/365 without you ever having to lift a finger.

Just imagine how much time what would save you and how it would allow you to focus on other important tasks related to your business.

Time is something we are always fighting for and since web surfers primarily come online in search of ‘Information’ it can be a very time consuming ordeal to deal with on a Daily or Weekly basis.

The other great thing about “RSS” is it’ll keep the ‘Search Engine Spiders’ coming back more frequently since “RSS” automatically updates your selected feeds ‘Daily’ with Fresh targeted content.

And if you know anything about Search Engines then you’ll know that they LOVE fresh content to digest.

Now that you have a general idea of what “RSS” can do for you and your website(s), your probably wondering how you can take advantage of this right now and where to find these ever so valuable ‘RSS Feeds’.

The answer is simple — ‘Article Directories’.

Now, not all ‘Article Directories’ have adopted “RSS” at this point But they will soon catch on once they see the value RSS offers there publishers(you) and readers.

Below I have listed a few ‘Article Directories’ offering RSS feeds in every category under the sun for you to choose from.

Article99.com

GoArticles.com

EzineArticles.com

Now, all you need to get your hands on(if you don’t already) is a “RSS Reader Script” and have it installed on your server so that you can display the ‘RSS Feeds’ on your website(s).

All you have to do is a simple search on Google using the keyword “RSS Reader Script”.

Once you’ve done all that and updated your website(s) pages with your RSS code, you can now just sit back, relax and let RSS(Real Simple Syndication) do all the work for you 24/7/365 while you go focus on other important tasks.

About The Author:

Looking for MORE Information or Webmaster Resources on RSS and RSS Feeds? Look NO Further! Go shop Cory Threlfall’s TOP Rated CBmall that carries over 10,000 of the Internets BEST ‘Information Products’ available Online. rss and rss feeds