How Big Is Your…And An Overview of RSS

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Newer Internet Marketers continue to be confounded, bewildered and frustrated by RSS.

Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.

But what does it all mean?

And is it a new technology.

Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.

RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.

While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.

The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.

Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.

Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.

My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.

Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.

If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining Continue reading →

Blogging Resources For Jo Han Mok Telecall

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I just finished an affiliate marketing training call with Internet Marketing Guru Jo Han Mok and Rasheed Ali.

My topic area was on blogging and blog monetization.

As a followup to the call, here’re my notes for the participants.

Blogging at blogger.com and wordpress.com

It’s ok to test out the blogging waters when you’re starting out, however, do note that these services are targeted at hobbyists and recreational bloggers.

You’re subjected to their terms of service, which unsurprisingly prohibits promotion of adult, gaming, pharmaceutical-related niches among others.
Violation of their terms of service means they may forcibly take back the domain if you happen to violate their rules (inadvertedly or otherwise).

If you build up the Google PageRank or traffic to the domain, you don’t have the option of selling the domain (which could be value in the hundreds of thousand or millions for a high value, high traffic domain). The blog service provider owns the domain. Good luck Continue reading →

The Confluence of Search Engines and “Human Search Engines”

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While search engines ranking and categorization algorithmns continue to mimic human behavior and incorporate patterns of human usage, it will be some time before they are able to mirror human patterns of search.

True, they are able to provide a breadth of information that runs into the hundreds of millions of results. But at the same time, how many are truly relevant to the one result you’re looking for.

Sometimes due to reasons of ultra efficient search engine optimization, the most relevant result might be located on page 5 or 6 of the search engine result pages. Finding that metaphorical needles in the haystack tends to lead to frustration, and in the worst case scenario, not finding the information you’re looking for.

Enter the “Human Search Engines”. Continue reading →

Make Big Money by Posting Videos Online

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Until now, there’d not been many ways to make money by posting videos online.

Kelvin Hui’s Ambatch.com provided an opportunity for users to embed links to video content services, in exchange for 100% of the adsense revenue. The original video portal is no longer available, although several new sub-portals have been launched.

I’d tried that for a time, although it seemed like the majority of the users were based in Asia and the bulk of users were on the Chinese language interface. English content posters seemed to be in the minority.

Enter MetaCafe, a video content hosting and publishing platform which rewards users for posting original content.

To date, some of the content publishers have done very well:

metacafe

Lest you think the accrued figure as impossible to achieve, look at Continue reading →

Cheap Outsourcing Can Ruin Your Online Marketing Business

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I had a frightful lesson in outsourcing today: You’ll need to keep tabs on the efforts of the people you’re outsourcing work to, otherwise it could be to the detriment of your business.

You may already know that in addition to this blog, I own a network of content sites.

internet marketing cookbook

In particular, Internet Marketing Cookbook has been one of my pet projects.

But in the past couple of months, with the activity surrounding Affiliate Summit West and a couple of new projects I was working on, I didn’t have time to manage all my sites.

So it seemed like a good idea to Continue reading →

Overture Keyword Selector tool R.I.P. 2007?

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For a number of days I’ve been unable to access the keyword selector tool over at Overture Keyword Selector tool.

Though the results lag real time searches by about 2 months, they’re good for getting an indication of search volume and related searches for given keywords and keyphrases.

In the past few weeks, there’s been speculation that with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing (AKA Panama), the Overture tool might be taken down for good.

[Incidentally, Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones gives a good overview of Panama with his post: The New Yahoo Search (aka, Panama) Looking More & More Like Google Adwords ]

While there’s no official word from Yahoo!, it looks like traffic to Overture, while dropping since the disruption in the service sometime around mid December 2006, is still very robust.

alexa overture

So it was a little surprising that the Overture tool appeared Continue reading →