RSS which stands for really simple syndication is a format that is associated with the XML family of file formatting. It functions by continuously running through the websites to scan for updates. It then sends these updates to all of the people who are subscribed to these websites using a feed. This is used most often in web syndication.

To be able to use an RSS feed, you need to have an aggregator, also known as a feed reader. These aggregators are available widely online, so it won’t be that hard to scour the net to find the one that you’re looking for. There are a variety of aggregators to choose from. Best of all is that you can download them for free.

RSS feeds are often used in blogs, news, and entertainment websites. Anything that relays information to subscribers, and is often updated. These updates are then sent to all of the subscribers of these sites that carry RRS feeds. The updates are summarized, so you’d have an idea what stories they are referring to. If you are interested in the information it’s relaying, you can then click on the text to get the longer version of the text.

The great thing about RSS feeds, is that you can also read them through your cell phones, and they come in PDAs.

Most entertainment websites carry RSS feeds such as BBC, Reuters, Boston Globe, CNN, etc. Music reviews, game news, interviews, movie stories, are also put into RSS feeds. This makes it a lot easier for fans to follow stories about their favorite movie stars, sports heroes, latest gaming news, etc. It is offered to you unadulterated, and free from annoying spam that clutters your emails.

A lot of businesses also use RSS feeds to reach their customers. This allows them to directly relay information, uncorrupted, and instantaneously. As soon as you download an RSS feed, you receive the information right away.

Entertainment RSS is an all in one stop. You don’t have to click from website to website to get the news that you’re after. Entertainment websites that carry RSS offer you the news that you need, automatically as soon as they’re updated. This saves you the time and the trouble of having to scour the net for the information that you’re looking for.

It is easy to subscribe to entertainment RSS feed, just click the button that indicates the RSS feed. You usually have to copy the URL into your aggregator, but some RSS feeds automatically download into your reader. You can unsubscribe to an RSS feed anytime.

There are some search engines that allow you to search information contained through RSS feeds. There are also feed directories that categorize RSS feeds by order of interest. This makes it easier for people to locate all of the information contained in RSS on any available topics online.

Local news can also be found via RSS. So now instead of tuning into your TV sets to get the latest headlines, updates, and sporting news, you can subscribe to an RSS feed. This way, you get all of your news at once. This allows you to control the way you receive information, and enables you to receive news at your own free time.

The great thing about this is that readers can read the headlines and summary, and then can choose which stories they want to follow. This gives the reader control over the content of the information they are receiving. This way, they are not bombarded by numerous advertisements and countless useless information that they don’t have any use for.

Individuals who have blogs with syndicated content can submit the syndicated versions of their blogs to RSS feed directories. This way, blog enthusiasts can have access to their RSS feeds.

Feedster is one of the most popular search engines. You can use this search engine to find numerous entertainment articles, stories, reviews, using an RSS feed. The great thing about RSS feeds, is that you’re always updated with the latest news and happenings.

RSS feeds is revolutionizing the way information consumers get their content. Instead of being bombarded with a plethora of useless information, the consumers now can select & reject the material that goes into their consciousness.

In this, day three of the five part traffic generation course, we are going to discuss how joint venture giveaways will help you generate traffic to your site. In fact, they do more than generate traffic. Joint venture giveaways will also help you build a large opt-in list, in a very short period of time, and you can bring those visitors back to your site time and time again.

Joining a joint venture giveaway is easy and free. You just need to find a giveaway, and these can be found through joint venture related forums, or through the search engines. Once you’ve found a giveaway, you need a free gift to give away. This can be something that you create yourself, or have created for you, such as a free report, an audio, a video, or an ebook – or even a piece of software. It can also be a Private Label Rights product that you have. The important thing is that your gift has value to the people that will be downloading it.

You need an autoresponder and a website. Set up an opt-in page, which is often called a squeeze page or a capture page, on your site. Connect it to your autoresponder, and in your autoresponder, set up a list for the giveaway. Create your confirmation email and download for the gift email in your autoresponder.

Determine where the visitor will go, once they hit the submit button on your opt-in page. They can go to the first page of your site. They could be sent to a sales page for an affiliate product that you sell. You could set up a One Time Offer, or OTO, where they have one chance to purchase a product from you, at a special price.

Finally, when you are all set up on your end; submit your information to the host of the joint venture giveaway event. They will typically want the name of your gift, the URL of your opt-in page, a description of that gift, and the link to the graphic that represents your gift, such as a graphical ebook cover or CD cover.

While you will build a nice big list with the joint venture giveaway, remember that your purpose is to generate traffic as well. You don’t want people showing up, getting their gift, and leaving – never to be seen or heard from again. Your list resolves a lot of this, because you can use it to bring them back.

But at the same time, when your visitor is redirected after submitting the form, try to have them redirected to a page on your site that will immediately capture their attention, and keep them there for a while, even after they have been given their free gift.

I read a lot of sites around the net every day. Many about SEO, marketing, and monetizing blogs. I notice something that seems to be a constant in most of them. Everyone seems to have a different slant on what it means to create income with your blog/site. There are quite a few sites that talk about nothing but sales. There’s nothing wrong with straight sales, if you have a good product and a good supply. Some talk about straight search engine marketing and then using a service like google adsense. And some are affiliate cheerleaders. There is nothing wrong with any one of these methods, the problem starts when relying on only one of them as an income source.

If you look over some of the bigger bloggers in the blogosphere, they have multiple income streams on their site. Adsense is really not the BIGGEST moneymaker for most sites, this one included. However adsense doesnt need to be updated, or babysat. So its sort of the tortoise of the income stream race for most sites. It may not have the big numbers, but it is consistent. Most of the ppc (pay per click) or content oriented text sites are the same way, and generate even less than adsense ads. Affilliate traffic is a nice little income stream generator as well. Most of the affiliate networks out there offer targeted products/websites and usually give multi-tier income for referrals. Without the traffic, these systems have no ‘umph’. Multiple income streams are what you want with your blog, but not just multiple income streams that run on ‘auto-pilot’. People arent reading, or going to read your blog because of affiliate links or banners, they are reading it because they like your input, or you have interesting content, and as the saying goes, ‘content is king’. You can make your content work for you by generating traffic, and you can even get paid just for your content itself.

So what are the main sources of multiple streams of income for a blog?

Affiliate link - Probably the easiest and most versatile. Usually if the site is selling something, they have an affilliate network in place and you will get a percentage of sales that come through you.

Review Posts - If you have a good solid audience and good traffic, a positive review from your site can boost sales for another site. Many of the big name sites like Shoemoney, DoshDosh, and of course John Chow have such a great amount of traffic (I believe JohnChow gets around 10k views per day), so a postive review from one of these sites can have a pretty impressive effect. When doing reviews, be honest and unbiased. When people are spending money, they want the hard truth about their purchase, warts and all. Did it work for you? Have you heard of any bad reviews, what is your overall opinion of the product or service? Think of what you would want to know if you were asking someone before spending your money on the product

Selling ad space - Why not sell the open spaces on your page? A decent sized ad in a strategic spot on a popular blog or site can be a great traffic magnet. Don’t fall into the trap that many do and try to sell every square inch of open space. That will make your blog too ‘busy’ on the eyes, and will be counterproductive because nobody will want to read your blog for all the ad clutter. Plus think of it as supply and demand. If you only have one or two coveted spots, you can have a little more flexibility with pricing.

Donations - Not a big favorite of mine, and quite honestly if you have a blog that is already monetized, most people will see asking for donations as ‘begging’. If you’re starting out, give donations a try. A service like paypal would easily handle this task. If you’re a bit more established, you might want to hold off on that option.

Selling Content - If you have a couple months or even years of good content, why not package it up into .pdf format and sell it. If not sell it, make it available to those that sign up on your site, or for your newsletter. The content may not make a profit initially, but it will help build a mailing list and an audience. Consider video as well. Windows Movie maker is actually a pretty handy little windows feature that will let you assemble a pretty decent video that you can upload onto your site for your members. If you have the equipment, like a decent vid came or even a decent camera, making a quick video presentation of your content. I’m planning on creating a .pdf document with information from previous posts in the near future. Check back for its availability.

Having even a semi-popular blog doesn’t guarantee instant income streams, and putting all your eggs into one basket is really not a solid way to keep that flow going when it does start. Diversify your campaigns, create quality content and make it easy for people to get to your content. But most importantly, be creative.

Good Luck!

     Video has been the workhorse of marketing pratically since it’s inception. The saying I hear most often is ‘If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth?’ There is probably not a better statement to describe the impact that video can have on your marketing efforts. Sites like youtube.com shows that there is a voracious interest in videos in general on the Internet, especially amateur shot.

Leads by Video is a fairly new site that will let you upload your video ad spots to their site to be viewed by others for free. Step by step instructions are provided about how to make your ad spot with Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows. You litterally can have a video spot up and running in about 20 minutes. If you don’t feel that you know enough about it or just don’t have the time to make a video, Affordable Video Marketing offers professional video production services for $1999.

By viewing other videos, in the LBV network, you accumulate credits for yourself to have your video viewed by others. This is a good (and cheap) way to not only brand your blog/product, but use a time tested medium to get your information to the masses.

So you have an audience, you get decent traffic, everything is running like a finely tuned machine. Now you need to increase your traffic, to do that you need fresh content, and If you can put a little money in your pocket, thats a good thing too. Most bloggers that are just getting started usually find out that bringing together fresh content to get the traffic to get the revenue can be a tall order

PayPerPost.com is a site that will pay you for your blog reviews. When you first log into PPP, you must insert a little bit of code in your blog to register it with the PPP service and then a list is presented to you for opportunities that are available to you. These sites are submitted by various sites and interests, usually to create a buzz for a new product, or to get information out there. The opportunities offered have different criteria for availability. Some are made available due to your content, some require a certain Google pagerank, some a certain Alexa score. Usually the more stringent the requirements, the higher the payout for a good quality blog. For the most part, these opportunities will be in line with your site’s theme. Some may just be ‘in line’ with your traffic.

So the big question….how much? Well, the lowest amount is $5.00 for a blog opportunity. If you have the traffic, or are high up in google or alexa, there are opportunities advertised that go up to $250. So if you have the traffic, they have the dough. There is also referral money to be had! If someone signs up through your referral badge, takes an opportunity and gets their post approved and paid for, you get $15.00. You even get paid $7.50 everytime someone reviews your post through PPP’s ‘Review My Post’ program.

The PPP site is overall pretty cool and very easy to navigate. There is also a handy PPP firefox add-on that will let you surf PPP sites for available opportunities and suggest sites that you would want to blog about. PayPerPost provides banners and widgets to help you not only promote them through their affiliate network

PPP is highly regarded on sites like JohnChow.com, and has a pretty positive buzz about it all over the blogosphere for those that are trying to create income with thier blogs. If you want to make your blog traffic work even harder for you, PayPerPost is where you want to start.

The last couple of weeks have been witness to huge changes in the blogging world. The Internet in general (for those that are paying attention to the online community) has had a couple startups that took flight within a relatively short amount of time that have the possibility of untold and explosive growth. Here are the ones that have caught my attention lately.

Blog Rush- Blog Rush is a widget for blogs that was just thrown out onto the Internet last week. On November 10th, Blog Rush’s buzz began to churn and the chaos started. It went from unknown to blogosphere superstar in about 4 days and then exploded on the 14th. Once John Chow and Shoemoney threw their very positive 2 cents in on the product, it was pretty much all over with at that point and the rocket took off. The idea behind Blog Rush is a pretty good one. It’s a widget that you can put on your website that will give you 1:1 ratio of impressions per pageviews on your own site. To say that it sent shockwaves through the blogosphere would be putting it mildly. Blog Rush is the amazing product of Mr. John Reese at Income.com. If you want to check out his blog, you can read through his pre-release notes and general thoughts of a man that is pretty damn sure he’s about to light a fuse on a big bomb, and he was right. It will be interesting to see what happens next for Mr. Reese.

Yuwie.com - This might be the Myspace killer. Visually, its pretty much the same thing as myspace. Yuwie is a social site, where you can upload pictures, interact with other, join clubs, all the same stuff you could do on Myspace when it started. The only notable exception that I see is that there is no way to upload videos. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Here’s the bonus. You can get paid to use this. This is a social networking site that not only plays you residuals, but let’s you create a downline. Getting paid to flirt..can you beat that one? I already see people using myspace backgrounds, I haven’t seen the music in the pages just yet, but I’m sure that’s only a matter of time. I could see this getting to be pretty big pretty quick.

Dealdotcom.com - Dealdotcom will actually launch within 30 minutes of the time of this post. The buzz around it is very heavy at this time so to see what happens when they actually lift the gate will be interesting. This is going to be something like Woot but for marketing oriented programs, software, books, etc. If you have something you want to get out to the marketing circles of the internet, this is the place to go.

Milliondollarwiki.com - This is one of my favorites. Beautiful in it’s simplicity. The Million Dollar Wiki is an ingenius site created by Graham Langdon, a 21 year old senior from the University of Connecticut. For $100 you can buy a page on the milliondollarwiki and have full control over its content. add what you want. This very well could be something that, if it catches, could be a major driving force for many sites. I expect to see wiki’s everywhere in this capacity soon. As of this writing MDW has sold 902 pages for $100

Each one of these sites, in their own way are inovative, clever and in some ways groundbreaking. It will be interesting to see how they grow, and what overall effect these sites have on internet marketing.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided to abandon net neutrality and allow telecoms companies to charge websites for access.

The FTC said in a report that, despite popular support for net neutrality, it was minded to let the market sort out the issue.

This means that the organisation will not stand in the way of companies using differential pricing to make sure that some websites can be viewed more quickly than others. The report also counsels against net neutrality legislation.

“This report recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving dynamic industry of broadband internet access, which is generally moving towards more, not less, competition,” FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras wrote.

“In the absence of significant market failure, or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”

The report has caused outrage in the online community. Many are worried that any abandonment of net neutrality will harm competition, since it will allow big companies to outspend start-ups.

“Mostly the FTC suggests ways that the telephone and cable companies could have new ways to make money from content and applications providers,” said Art Brodsky, of internet advocacy group Public Knowledge.

“Or lower-income subscribers could be charged lower prices, subsidised by ‘prioritization revenues’ much as supported email services now provide free email accounts. Nowhere is there discussion of what the consumer gets out of the deal.”

      Now, if you havent been paying attention, Net Neutrality was/is an issue about access. With Net Neutrality in place, everyone has equal access to the Internet and the information on the Internet. With the FTC dropping its support of Net Neutrality, now the ‘big wheels’ on the internet, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, will have the opportunity to basically pay so that their content gets to you faster than the average mom and pop website. The heavy hitters will have the ability to pay to make sure that their content is given priority through your ISP to get to you. So your gaming, your bit-torrents, your file downloads will have their bandwith somewhat throttled back so that you can get those fresh new ads from AOL, or so your Yahoo Toolbar will be able to make its oh so important conections back to their content servers to bring you all those bright and shiny buttons on your toolbar that you probably dont use anyway, if you even have it installed at all.

     In short, this is not a good thing for the consumer. Be prepared for a ruckus on the Internet, when people realize that their Internet enjoyment is now being choked down so that the admakers of the world can have better access to shove their shit down your throat, people will not be happy. I hope that people DO wake up and not just stick their head back in WoW and hope it all goes away or that someone else does the work for them.

If you need to do a little reading to catch up, here ya go:
Wikipedia on Net Neturality
Hands Off

Iphone Iphone Iphone. It’s all people are talking about. The IPhone is released today and like the release of any other must have electronic, lines formed last night to get one.

     Lines formed as early as late Thursday night at the Apple store in New York, with the first in line there a full 109 hours before the actual release, to be sure to secure his place in cellphone history.

     To illustrate the ripple effect of this product:

• Searches for information on the IPhone on the Internet have caused a noticeable spike in search engine traffic providing a boost of 6.9 million queries on the Iphone this year
• 274 thousand searches per week in 2007.
• In the week after Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld Expo, 1.1 million searches for information on the device were performed.
• That week was second only to the week of 24 June, when iPhone madness sparked more than 1.2 million searches.
• The searches also generated more than 7.8 million click-throughs. Some 2.3 million of these went to Apple, while gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo each enjoyed more than 270,000 click-throughs from iPhone related searches. 
• Among the most popular terms for the search were ‘iPhone price’ and ‘iPhone release date’.
• Profiteers offer $1000 to stand in line for people to purchase an iPhone
• Playboy.com has already launched the iPlayboy channel just for the iPhone.
• Phishing sites have already become fully opertional sending out emails to get people to register for their ‘Free iphone’

God I love the smell of capitalism in the morning.

     Search engines can help get your site the traffic it needs to survive. Unfortunately there are a lot of variables to search engine submission. By ‘variables’ I mean mysteries, shrouded in darkness, wrapped in enigmas.
      When submitting to search engines, most of them tell you right away that they dont guarantee when or IF  you will have your site added to their directory if you do the free submissions. That’s the part that gets me about search engine submissions. The search engine’s themselves dont know if their software will ‘crawl’ (a.k.a. add) y0ur site to their directories, or when this will happen. How do you program a piece of software, have full control over the system it runs on, be able to view all activities within your system, yet dont know when or if it will work? But amazingly if you pay for the submission services, either directly to the search engines themselves or through pro submission sites (that may or may not be reputable) then there is more solid information available, but none can give you an exact date as to when your info will be searchable through any specific sites.

How do they work?
The Basics
Search engines essentially are programs designed to make what is best described as a Yellow Pages for the web. Search engines ‘crawl’ the Internet and create copies of every webpage they find and put them in a database. THen all of these webpages are analyzed so that when a user goes to a search engine’s website and searches for a phrase, the search engine looks through its database of websites and picks the most appropriate sites.
How did they start?
The three first modern search engines where launched in 1994, starting with Webcrawler that was created at the University of Washingon. The second was Lycos which began at Carnegie Mellon University, and finally, Yahoo!. The king of all search engines, Google, did not officially launch until September 1999, and was originally programmed by two individuals from Stanford (their original workplace was a rented residential garage). As you can see, the majority of search engines started with educational roots. The search engines themselves, are actually very complex programs, hence the secrecy and just general lack of knowledge about how they work.
How do Search Engines find you?
1.) Crawling. Crawling search engines, such as google, will find websites by following links from other sites. If there is a website out there that has a link to your website onit, and Google knows about that page, then they know about your site as well. Crawling search engines follow link after link to (in theory) find every page on the Internet.
2.) Submission. You can wait for the search engines to find you or you can go give them your information through submissions. Some search engines will only find your website if you submit to it, or will take much longer to find you if you don’t. Some will also charge you to submit your site’s information

Here is an excellent list of search engines with links and information about submission. Search Engine List. And here is an outstanding graphical interface to give you a visual of how search engines are related http://www.search-this.com/search-engine-decoder/

Paid Advertising.

Google Adwords
Google sells sponsored listings that appear above and to the right-hand side of its regular search results, these listings are called Google AdWords.

Paid search programs allow site owners to “bid” on the terms they wish to appear for. You agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. This is why sponsored listings are referred to as “pay-per-click” (PPC) or “cost-per-click” (CPC) advertising.

Google AdWords ranks sponsored listings based on a number of variables including the CPC (bid price), click-through-rate (CTR) and landing page quality. This page explains how ads are ranked in more detail.

If your goal is to build visibility on search engines quickly, then Google AdWords is an essential option to explore. It can put you in the top results of many major search engines within a short period of time.

Google distributes its paid ads to other partners, with some major sites listed on the Search Engine Results Chart . This provides you with exposure to more potential traffic. When setting up an AdWords campaign, you may choose to have your ads appear in the Search Network and/or Google’s Content Network (AdSense), or you may opt-out of either.

It is worthwhile for anyone to open a Google AdWords account and experiment with how paid listings may help drive traffic to a site, or use the service as a keyword research tool. Google’s self-service AdWords program charges a per-click fee, in addition to a $5 activation fee, but there is no minimum monthly spend.

As you continue to participate in paid search advertising, you may find that the editorial or “free” listings generated by your submissions to directories and crawlers have kicked in. While some marketers elect to eliminate their paid search ad spend when this happens, you may find that you want to continue spending, or perhaps even increase your budget, to target terms for which you don’t receive good editorial placement.

Search Engine Watch members have access to a detailed How Google Works page that guides you even more through the process of how AdWords operates. To learn more about becoming a member to access this information, visit the membership information page.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), formerly Overture and GoTo, also allows sites to “bid” on the terms they wish to appear for.

Up until the recent “Panama” improvement, YSM ranked sponsored listings based on cost-per-click. For instance, if you wanted to appear in the top listings for “running shoes.” You might agree to pay 25 cents per click. If no one agrees to pay more than this, then you would be in the number one spot. If someone else later decides to pay 26 cents, then you slip into the number two position. You could then bid 27 cents and move back on top, if you wanted to.

Yahoo Panama brings YSM’s ranking algorithm for paid ads more in line with Google by considering additional variables such as click-through-rate and landing page quality.

If your goal is to build instant visibility on search engines, Yahoo Search Marketing is an excellent option to explore, putting you in the top results of many major search engines within a short period of time.

Again, it is well worth it for anyone to open a YSM account and experiment with paid listings. An account requires a $5 minimum deposit, and you set your own daily budget. By carefully selecting targeted terms, you can stretch that money out for one or two months and get quality traffic.

As with Google, you may wish to eliminate your ad spend or continue for terms not receiving good editorial placement once your initial deposit has expired.

Search Engine Watch members have access to a detailed How Yahoo Search Marketing Works page that guides you even more through the process of getting started with the service. To learn more about becoming a member to access this information, visit the membership information page.

Microsoft Ad Center

Microsoft adCenter launched in May 2006. Like Google and Yahoo, it allows advertisers to “bid” on the keywords they wish to have their ads show up for. The system uses what is called the “black box” bid and ranking method, similar to the way Google and now Yahoo determine Cost Per Click (CPC).

The CPC is a combination of how much you are willing to bid (max bid) and your Click Thru Rate (CTR) in comparison to the others bidding for that particular keyword.

Upon launch, adCenter distinguished itself from competitors by being the first to offer geographic, demographic and daypart targeting. It requires a $5 service fee for account setup. After that, you pay the cost of the clicks.

Bidding starts at $0.10 minimum. Sometimes $0.05 bids go through. You can increase your bid to reach a targeted audience through Targeted Bidding. This allows you to target based on (1) users in a specific geographic location, (2) users searching on specific days of the week or during specific hours of the day or night, and (3) users of a specific gender or age.

While initially pleased with adCenter, marketers would like to see more traffic. The consensus is that traffic performs well and is growing but is still not at the level of other search engines.

Experienced Search Marketers also like the targeting tools. These tools allow them to narrow the ad buy, resulting in audiences that convert better, allowing marketers to put more of their budgets into other ad buys or into additional keywords with Microsoft. The help section is very detailed.

That’s the basics for Search engine submission. Search engines have way more to them that what’s covered here, but this article and these links should get you going in the right direction. Watch for an upcoming post on Search Engine Optimization to help make your website more easily readable to crawlers.

     Well that’s the name of the game right? Many people who have blogs and blog regularly are trying to get a little income started out of their efforts. Nothing wrong with that. And on the other end of it, there are many companies and sites out there that would love to have a popular blog..such as this one write about their site to help generate traffic. There are quite a few sites that can make this happen. One of them is PayPerPost <a href=”http://www.payperpost.com“> ads on blogs</a>. Basically you sign up, and select the specializations of your blog, or your specific interests, and offers are made available to you that relate to those interests. Offers range from as low as $5.00 per post, up into the hundreds depending on your site’s traffic and your google rank.

     I had heard a lot of good reviews on this site from fellow bloggers and other blogging sites, so I thought it might be worth checking out. The sign-up was easy, the site is clean, concise and easy to navigate. So far it seems pretty straight forward. I just signed up today, and THIS is my first post for pay per post, so I can’t comment on their payouts, other than they come through paypal. I will keep everyone updated on pay per post, and other pay to post sites that I come across.

At this point, I would say PPP is worth signing up for if they follow through with their promises. Check them out

Pay Per Post