I would say not many marketers understand RSS well. Yes, we use it in many occasions, but we don’t really know and comprehend on how to use it properly. Using RSS for marketing purposes requires different approach.

Let us start with what is rss?

RSS is a short form of “Really simple syndication”. It is a technology where we can broadcast our articles, blog entry or news trough a network which send the information directly to the readers. One main advantage for RSS service, Readers don’t need to visit the website for the update.  All the latest information will be send directly to subscribers’ email/RSS readers. So if we are interested in information from 10 different sites, we don’t need to visit each and every sites. What we need to do is to subscribe for the websites’ RSS feeds.  All information from the website will be send to us directly through our email or RSS readers.

What is its advantage?

There are two major benefits of using RSS.

One important advantage, RSS is fast in transmitting our website update, almost instantly. It won’t use much of our server power, as all the processing part is done by the RSS networks and readers. We don’t have to worry much about our server limitation and capability.

RSS also capable of sending back the much needed links juice. Some readers will also store our website update in a certain directory.  So when the search engine sprawl the site it will also follow our RSS links. Indirectly search engine will also consider it as a link pointing to our website. It is good for our SEO.

The disadvantage

Unfortunately RSS is also one of the most difficult systems to monetize.  Event top bloggers have a very low conversion rate. I don’t have the exact answer why this is happening. But I’m sure we can improve the odd by providing quality articles or information.

How can we use it?

Here are few recommendation on how to use RSS effectively.  Of course you can always improve the method to fit your needs.

-          We need to provide full article rather than a snippet. Most of RSS subscribers are only interested in the information that we provide. So in order to make sure they are loyal to our website, we have to provide what they are looking for.

-          Optimize Feedburner usage. Feedburner provide details information of the RSS feed which is critical for our analytical purposes. WordPress RSS don’t have such facilities. So what we need to do is to feed our website RSS feeds to Feedburner, and offer the Feedburner feeds instead.  Let me know if any of you have difficulty in setting up the Feedburner feeds. It is not that difficult.

-          We should also submit the RSS feeds to RSS directories. It will provide additional back-linking without much effort on our side, except for the RSS directory submission. We can always free ourselves from the mundane task through outsourcing.

-          As mention earlier, RSS is difficult to monetize.  Fortunately nowadays we can integrate ads along with the feeds. It can easily be done through Feedburner. Based on information that I gather, the conversion is not that attractive. However it is good an opportunity and we should optimize all the opportunities that we have.

Conclusion

As conclusion we should incorporate RSS as one of our marketing strategy.  It provides opportunity that we should use and optimize.

Time

The most important factor is time. Internet marketing business allows us control our own time and schedule. We are the one who is responsible to fix our working hours. Be it day time or night time all up to us. As long as we can meet our business requirement then it should be acceptable. The most important part is to fixed our business hours and stick to the schedule. Fixed schedule allows us focus on our objective and works. It will have direct impact to our productivity. We just need some discipline here.

Small investment

Setting up an internet based business will only cost a small amount of investment, far cheaper than having a brick and mortar business. Our monthly overhead is also minimal. In most cases we don’t really need to make a big loan to finance our new business. In some business model the initial start up cost can be considered zero, except for our own time. If we really tight on the budget, we can start our business on a small scale. More like testing the water. During this “training” period we can gain the business skills based on actual experience.  Not just a theory from websites or ebooks. Once we gain these valuable skills, the risk for going into a larger scale business will be very small. Success will almost be certain.

Direct impact to the bottom line

Since this is our own business, what we do will have direct impact to the bottom-line, our income. The more effort you put in, the bigger the potential return. It is such a great feeling to see how our very own effort turns to money. Nothing is more rewarding than that. Nobody can claim to be responsible for the achievement. We have 100% control of the business future.

Internet marketing is real.  We can make money from the comfort of our home, with all the flexibility. We won’t find such flexibility in the offline business. So what are you waiting for? Make your move now.  Share with me if you have any difficulty in taking the first step.

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo

First go to post >> categories

Next just click “edit” on any of the category that we are interested in.  Our browser will display a complete url along with the category ID.  Never realize it will be that simple.

Include keywords

It is known that search engine tend to give some weight on keywords in a domain name while deciding the relevancy of a website. So as a marketer, we should use it as an opportunity. Just list out keywords that we are targeting.  5 to 10 keywords should be sufficient enough. Run through the list with your preferred registrar. Note down all available domains that contains our targeted keywords.  Once done,  just go through the list and decide the best domain for our use.

Side note, Godaddy offers bulk domain check. We can check all available domains in one go. But personally I don’t like Godaddy due to tons of ads and offers before I can register a domain. I just use Godaddy to check available domains, then register the domains with namecheap.

Only use com, net and org

If you are thinking of selling your website at a later date,  this tip is very important. Based on track records,  majority of “com” LTD tend to fetch higher price as compared to the other available extensions. So always give “com” a priority.  If you are planning for adsense or other affiliate business model,  then “net” and “org” are also a good option. Of course it does not really matter is we intend to use the website for non-commercial purposes.

Make it easy to remember

Make sure to consider the ease of remembering a domain name. Avoid wording that are difficult to spell and remember. Trendy words like “gamez” seems to be ok,  but it will confuse our users. In most cases,  users tend to type in “games” rather than “gamez”.  On the same note, majority of us also tend to type singular words, rather than plurals. Obviously selecting singular words have more merits.

Short and sweet

Shorter domain names are easy to remember. Choose a domain that is short and easy to remember, if they are still available.  Avoid hypen and numbers. Hypen and numbers will make our domain name more complex. Of course there are some exceptions to this. Some domain might require numbers as part of the keyword phrase.

Avoid Copyright Infringement

Avoid copyright infringement. Avoid all domains that contain copyright brands. This is very clear. Making a successful website involves lot of resources. We don’t want any legal hustle at a later date.  Most certainly, we might have to say good bye to all of our time and money we spend for the website.  All gone to waste.  It is better to target for keywords rather then brands.

Selecting domain name is not that difficult if we are clear on our objective. Try to follow the above tips.  It can surely simplify the process.

You see,  I’ve never teach my kids about internet marketing,  at least not right now. They are too young to be spoilt with the making money from the internet idea. I want them to have good education background first,  before I can teach them about the internet marketing.

I don’t know how it happen,  somehow my 11 years old son actually found a way of making money from the internet on his own. I’ve never teach him anything about internet marketing. Of course he is aware about my online venture,  and did ask me what I’m doing from time to time.

He actually discovered how to make money from URL shortening service. What he did is to find interesting URL, shorten the URL and share the links with his friends.  That all he did. The shortening service website will give a small commission for every user using their service. So when his friends open the url,  he will get his small commission. Currently he is only using facebook as his marketing platform. I don’t think it qualify to be called “marketing”.  More toward sharing I would say.

After few days he managed to accumulate few cents and he is very excited with the achievement. Sure we are not referring to big money here, but this is a good starting point.  I can still recall my first 13 cents from CJ.  That 13 cents proved that money can be made from internet marketing while we are sleeping.  That 13 cents also push me to learn more about internet marketing.

What I’m trying to say here,  we all can make money from the internet.  There are thousand of possibilities and ways. We need to persistence, and never give up when facing difficulties.  

Share with me your first experience.  Love to hear it from your.

Till the next sharing.

British teen, named Christian Owens, made his first 1 million dollar at the age of 16. Isn’t that interesting? He reached that 1 million mark through two of his online company, Mac Bundle Box and Branchr. Mac Bundle Box offers bundle Mac softwares at discounted prices. His second company is a pay per click company. Branchr currently serves over 300 million ads a month.

Interestingly enough his principals are hardwork, determination and drive. Nothing new I guess.

Enjoy the short video

Below are steps that we need to go though.  It is not that bad actually. Pretty straight forward process.  You can also watch youtube video for a better understanding.

1. First we need to make sure our hosting and server have all the software requirement. Two mandatory softwares are PHP and MySQL. You can refer to your hosting if you are not sure.  If you are using Hostgator,  than I’m sure your hosting package already include all the necessary requirement.
2. Next step is to download a copy of the latest wordpress file from www.wordpress.org. We also need to have ftp program. ftp which will help us transfering our files to the server.  I did discuss about it here.
3. Now login to our hosting cPanel and go to MySQL databases. What we need to do now is to create Database name, username and password. All our blog entry will be stored this database.  It is recommended to store the basic information about the database somewhere safe eventhough we don’t really need to use it after completing the installation process.
4. Then link User with Database and give all privileges to user on database.
5. On our pc, we need to unzip the wordpress file. Once done rename the wp-config-sample to wp-config. Then open the wp-config in a text editor and change the database name, user name and password. Save the file when done.
6. Now upload all the wordpress file to our server root directory. Usually the root directory folder is public_html.
7. Once completed we can initiate the installation by typing www.mywebsite.com/wp-admin/install.php. Just replace mywebsite.com with your domain name.
8. WordPress then will ask you few basic information about your website.  WordPress will ask for blog title and tagline. Don’t worry much about the details,  you can always change the basic information later.

That is all about it.  Nothing much.  Let me know if you still need some help.

FaceBook
Facebook is one of the top “HOT” social media. In the recent survey, Facebook had officially surpassed Google in terms of time spend off all internet users in the United States. The beauty of Facebook, we can easily find and get connected to our friends and families. Facebook will recommend list of people who we might know. Once connected, all update and sharing will be broadcast to all members. Communication is just a click away.

So how can we utilize the Facebook for our marketing effort?

One quick way of benefiting from Facebook is through creating a special group for our niche. Every time we update the group, all the members will received the update.

Another marketing platform in Facebook is through a “page”. We can create a “page” for each of our niches. The “page” acts as a sales page, all copy writing techniques is also applicable here. Just remember, it is the only page that links between our potential customers and us. We need to do it correctly.

In addition, we can connect our blog to our Facebook. All blog update will be channeled to our Facebook page. There is no need to update the Facebook.

The potential of Facebook is so enormous, we just cannot run away from Facebook marketing.

MySpace
Prior to the popularity of Facebook, MySpace used to be one of the top social media. MySpace allows customization of profile and integration of features such and blogs, groups and bulletin. It provides infrastructure that centralizes all our marketing efforts. Over the years, somehow Myspace seems to be widely used by the entertainment industry. As a result lot of many musicians, bands and comedians use Myspace as a communication medium. Consequently, it allows the rise of independent bands by providing a platform that bypasses the big players in the industry.

So the question now, how can we use Myspace for our marketing purposes?

In Myspace we can send messages or make remarks. The messages and remarks will be visible to all our friends in the group. Apparently we can use this function to our advantage. We can broadcast our marketing messages from time to time. Like in any other efforts, use it with caution. Do not spam as people don’t like it for sure.

Twitter
Twitter is also known as micro-blogging. Through twitter, we can send out short message of 140 words or less at one time. It is extremely fast and powerful medium in sharing information especially through mobile devices.

Twitter is a practical and useful way of disseminating information to your group. All the messages will go directly to those who “follow” you. Since the message is fairly short, we need to use catchy words when tweeting. We can always apply blogging approach when using Twitter. The only different is the length of our messages.

Personally I’m not using Twitter due to time constrain. But I know marketers who successfully use Twitter as their main marketing medium.

Digg
Digg is a platform to share good information or breaking news. Discovering and sharing of good websites is the basis of Digg existence. Users can share all good websites by submitting the urls to Digg. The content can be anything.

Popularity of a site is measured from the numbers of vote it gets. Sites with high numbers of votes will be placed at the top. As a reward, more exposure will be given to the sites. In a simple term, we will get more traffic.

We can use Digg to promote our website. We can get good numbers of visitor once we manage to push our site to top. The question is, how can we make our site popular? The obvious method is to write good contents. Write for our visitors not for search engine.

As per its original intend, we can also use Digg to monitor new development in our niche. Information that we gather help us deciding our next move.

Conclusion
Social media can be used as one of our marketing tool. It simplifies our communication and provides an opportunity that we should leverage on. The key is to identify our needs and find the best social media that suit our needs.

RSS fees

Most blogs and websites offer RSS feeds as an extension of what we have published at the website.  So it is wise to use it as part of our marketing strategy. Our RSS feeds should be submitted to top RSS feed directories. Submission to the top 50 directories will be sufficient.  There is no need to submit to thousands of RSS sites. Unless you have extra resources.

There are two main advantages here.  One, we will get the much needed backlinks. The second advantage, our articles will be exposed to users that subscribe to the RSS.

Backlinks

Backlinking has been around as long as I can remember.  It is a proven tool.  Search engine is using backlinks as one of the main measurement for our site popularity. There are many ways of getting backlinks. We can get backlinks through writing articles, blogs, links swaping, videos, directory submissions, forum links and many more. Unfortunately backlinking effort requires lot of resources. This is the major obstacle. Fortunately we can outsource the task.

Press Release

Press release is one of the crucial steps in website promotion. It will give a boast to a new website popularity along with the much needed exposure. We should use press release whenever we launch something new. The key success factor in press release is the selection of the press release sites.  Submission to the top 20 press release sites should be sufficient.

Social Bookmarking

Facebook, twitter and many other social bookmarking have changed the overall SEO approach for the last several years. Prior to that,  marketers tend to use social bookmarking as a supplement to the other marketing tools. However now days, some are using social bookmarking as their main arsenals. This is due to the fact that social bookmarking is offering a large potential.

Here are just a brief overall view of what we can do in promoting our websites.  In the next few weeks I’ll discuss each of the steps in great details.

Most of my sites are using wordpress.  So for pinging I’m using cbnet Ping Optimizer. The beauty of the plugin,  it will manage our pinging process.  It prevents wordpress from excessive pinging. Excessive pinging can have negative effect from search engine. You can download it directly from wordpress site : cbnet Ping Optimizer

It is a free plugin and can easily be installed and activated.  To make it more effective we also need to have a list of ping sites. To help you out I’m attaching ping sites that I’ve been using for sometime now. There are 54 sites in the file.  Just copy the list into your cbnet ping optimizer plugin.  That it. We are done.

Share with us you list if you happen to have a more complete one.

Here is the ping list : noorazman.com ping list