Do you know what is an RSS ? Well, according to Wikipedia, the RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

The problem is that a very small percentage of the internet population knows of the RSS format and its benefits, so we should try let them know about this mistake. RSS is very important, because it allows users to stay connected with different websites and applications and to receive regular updates. Unfortunately, a lot of users doesn’t understand the importance of using RSS, so let’s do something about this. The RSS Awareness day is the solution.

A newbie in this world of blogging asked me what should his first post be about? Well, in my opinion, the first post is very important because it your blog’s tone. So, here’s what i’ve answered him :
1. Don’t forget to mention who you are!

Photo by Pepitoid

You should introduce yourself to your potential blog’s readers and tell them something about your business. Sharing some photos with you and providing as many information about yourself and your business will make things easier for the readers to trust you.

2. Why you are blogging?

This is one of the most important questions, because it forces you to spell out your intentions to your audience. Trust me, if you won’t gain your readers trust, they won’t be coming to your blog, so that you can make money on their backs.

3. What’s your niche?

Will you be blogging about your business, or perhaps the lifestyles of your customers? That’s not a difficult question. Answering the above questions makes the reader to be focused on what the goal of your blog is.

4. How I can leave feedback?

Spell out some contact details and don’t be afraid to encourage feedback, and even disagreement. But do everything you can to make sure that my feedback is appreciated, and encouraged.

Make Money With Wordpress Blogs

Multiple streams of income available. Make sure you capitalize on your blogs!

There are a number of UK bingo portals that provide and informative service to the discerning UK online bingo player or even to the newbie, but none quite like unluckyforsome.co.uk. This state of the art bingo portal has all the information needed by the UK bingo player to keep informed and up-to-date with any happening in the UK online bingo industry. They even carry news of some of the more interesting land based bingo stories.

Essentially the site provides an educational service, informing the UK online bingo player of what to look for in a site, how to play the game and how to take advantage of all the different promotions, special offers and free bingo bonuses that is available online today. They provide a vital service, because if you have ever played online bingo you will know just how many sites are available to the UK online bingo player. This can become confusing to say the least, and to ensure that the UK player does not choose a site that might not be secure, please do yourself a favour and check with unluckyforsome.co.uk, before even considering playing in a site that looks dicey.

The comprehensive aspect offered by unluckyforsome.co.uk, will cover any information regarding UK online bingo for the online player, there are tips reviews and news. A forum and a blog so you can keep in touch with other online bingo players and have somewhere to speak your mind about the game you love. There are so many wonderful features about unluckyforsome.co.uk that unfortunately I cannot cover in the short space allotted to me, so take a look for yourself.

Article Marketer

My Number One SEO Tool

According to a letter sent by Jerry Yang to reject Steven Ballmer’s offer, Yahoo had also announced an Adsense like Ad Sales System, called AMP (Ad Management Platform).

Yahoo AMP was being debated since February during the Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting. The Shareholders were not convinced that the system would work, and Yahoo was trying to tell them otherwise.

As far as it seems, the AMP will simplify online ads selling by Yahoo’s partner publishers in their own websites. Yahoo’s AMP will have Ads focusing in geo-targetting and behavioral analysis, something that is not currently included in YPN, or Yahoo’s Publisher Network.

In Yahoo’s AMP press release it said the following:

The AMP! platform will ultimately help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory - all from a single, integrated interface. It will have the ability to deliver highly relevant advertising to consumers across the entire Web, driving better results for marketers.

Sometimes managing and creating content on a niche blog can be tricky. What does that mean ? Well, it means designing a blog dedicated to a specific topic that only a certain group of people will appreciate and will be interested in it. Below you have 3 simple steps in creating a successful niche blog, using a few tried and tested ways. Here we go.

1. Knowing what you want to write about.
It’s very important to know what you write about and to have a strong passion for a certain topic. Don’t stop with what you already know, strive to become an expert about your passion. Read more and learn more. This is a very important step in creating a niche blog that offers quality and reliable content. By doing this you’ll also build yourself a great online reputation.

2. Generating traffic.
The traffic of your blog depends on several things and to achieve your goal, you should pay a close attention to them. Here are some methods of generating traffic :

- Providing quality content
A quality content is always bringing important traffic to your blog, and you know why? Because people like useful, smart and reliable articles and they appreciate when the information is written in a unique form.

- Building relationships.
The more relationships you build, the more people you’ll attract. Read and comment other blogs in order to build links to your blog. It’s simple!

3. Monetizing your blog.
If you provide quality content and you’re a good blogger, there’s no reason why you sholdn’t make money with your niche blog. After a couple of months, and after an important traffic is generated, you should start selling advertisement spaces. Trust me, there are plenty of internet companies that will appreciate the traffic you’ll bring to them and will pay you for it.

Make Money With Wordpress Blogs

Multiple streams of income available. Make sure you capitalize on your blogs!

According to ComScore’s recent report, it seems that Google’s paid clicks for February were 3% higher than the ones from February 2007. Well, but this February had 29 days, which means that practically the real groth is 0% year over year.

February had 515 million paid clicks, while January had 532 million, which means that there is also a 3% declined month over month. The thing that is not clear is if those number are coming from Google’s search network along or from a combination of the search and the content network. Anyway, there is a clear flat trend on paid clicks.

RBC has already weighed in on the results:

Overall deceleration from 30% in 4Q to flattish in 1Q continues to be a
concern… While its impossible to use comScore’s paid click number to
accurately predict Google revenue with any confidence, there does appear
to some co-specific self-inflicted reduction in ads, and these trends
can’t be ignored completely.

This datapoint will not have as much shock value as the Jan data, as
some investors were bracing for a negative y/y comp….our thesis on co
is unchanged, we still blv co’s int’l biz is strong but we’re cautious
on US growth relative to expectations in 08 and blv there is downside to
cons ests (cowen & ubs cut earlier this week)

Well, i’m not so sure, but this might be the delayed impact of Google’s latest changes on the ad formats and clickable areas. Oh, or maybe i’m wrong and the casual internet surfer is getting used to contextual advertising. We’ll have to wait and see what the future has in stores.

According to Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, it seems that Google and Microsoft are preparing to make an offer on Digg. The question is : how much does it worth right now? Arrington reports that the offer will be in the range of $200 million to $225 million. If this are the correct informations, that’s well below the $300 million price a bank working for Digg was floating a year ago.

But here’s another problem in here, they buyers must be asking themselves: if they buy Digg, will users rebel? Just last week, Kevin Rose (Digg’s founder) declared at a conference in Miami how the Digg community would react if his company got acquired:

For us, we have a fully funded business model, and we have a great ad relationship with Microsoft, and it feels really good to be able to react quickly and not have to worry about some of the problems that come with working with a larger company.

I’ve had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down. You can’t get a product out the door fast enough.

Here are some interesting opinions regarding the sale of Digg from some Digg users :

“…i’ve got a bad feeling about this…” (Hobbes24)
“Stay above corporate influence …Well as much as you can…. If you got to sell go with google” (macwisdom )
“Somehow i think if Microsoft manages to buy digg a larger revolt than 09 F9 11… will happen, at least i know what i will do” (t2t2)

“1. msft has spent enough time on this site to realize they are hated, why would they buy a community that hates them?
2. google has lost a few billion the last few months. while a digg purchase is still a drop in the bucket for them, i assume social website acquisitions can’t be a high priority for them and will be frowned upon by the market
3. after hd-dvd, i wouldn’t want digg if i had to buy it. why drop a couple hundred mil for a group that will turn on and shut the site down you in a second?” (canewediggit)

As you can see, Digg users hate Microsoft, but they won’t be too mad if Google aquires Digg. Well, we never know what the future has in stores but we will defenetly find out when the time comes.

Make Money With Wordpress Blogs

Multiple streams of income available. Make sure you capitalize on your blogs!

Today i am starting an interesting tutorial for those who want to find out more or to learn about the concept of SEO and some technical terms related to it.

What is a search engine?

A search engine is the one responsable for gathering information of your web pages so that it can provide meaningful results to the search query that the user is looking for. They index your web pages, and as far as it seems, they are doing a good job. Consider that 19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo! by August 2005 (and the web grew since then). Normally, search engines find what you are looking for in the first page of their results which is pretty interesting and clever, isn’t it?

To index all the pages, search engines usually have spiders (to crawl the web) which are computer program designed to visit pages and store important information about them. If you put a link on a page, and that page is visited by a spider, be sure that the spider will also go to the link found on that page. Spiders must do two things when visiting your website :

1) ascertain what the page is about so that they know what to show when someone searches for something.
2) they must decide which pages are more important than other pages so that they can order their search results

What is SEO ?

Search engine optimization is a method to make it clear to the spider what the page is about and to convince the spider that your page is a good one. Well, as soon as you achieve this, you will be shown high up in the search results when a user searches for whatever your page is about and that means that you get a lot of targeted visitors.

Example :

Let’s say you want to open a shoe shop, you would rather prefer to open it on the main shopping street of a major city than in the middle of a forest wouldn’t you ? Well, that’s the difference between a well optimized site and a site that has paid no attention to SEO. You may have the best shoe shop in the world but if it is in the forest how will anyone ever know about it?

There is one type of SEO ?

No, there are two types of SEO called White Hat and Black Hat. White Hat SEO is the type of optimization that the search engines approve and even encourage. Why? Because it’s about building simple to navigate sites for users as well as making them easy to spider.
Black Hat SEO is all about tricking the search engines to make them think that your site is something that it isn’t. This kind of tricks may work for a while but if search engines catch you, the site is likely to get banned from their indexes.

I will discuss more about the White Hat techniques in a future tutorial.

Use usually forget to add images to our post, but this just isn’t right. Surprisingly or not, images are very important, there are plenty of reasons your should use then and i will try to give you 6 of them.

So, let’s not waste time and let’s see the 6 big reasons why you should use images in every single post of your blog :

1. Images attract more attention and curiosity.
From my own experience, when i visit a site or i am just browsing through some blogs, i usually pass the posts that doesn’t have an image. Why ? Because i think it is lame not to use it. By using images in your posts, you get people to read your content when they might not otherwise.

2. People are getting bored by a huge mass of words.
Trust me, nobody would like to read paragraph after paragraph. People are getting bored very fast of those articles, and they’ll need some breaks. Images can be the break that they are looking for. When using images, your blog looks a whole more interesting. Think a little, if a new visitor comes to your site, and he will see those attractive images, it creates a perfect first impression.

3. An image can tell more than words.
When a reader isn’t sure what is he reading about, an image can help clear things up a bit. An image can tell more than words. It you’re talking about a confusing concept or a complicated contraption, having an image of the thing in your article it can help clarify things too.

4. Images can bring you search engine traffic.
If tagged correctly, an image can bring you a lot of targeted visitors from seach engines.

5. Images can fill up some space.
It not used for any of the reasons i’ve mentioned until #5, than here’s a good one. If you write a short post and don’t want it to look like something sloppy you didn’t work on, adding an image instantly gives the article a professional feel.

6. Why shouldn’t you use images in your posts ?
There’s no reason of not using images in your posts. Just give me a reason why you shouldn’t do that and i will defenetly think about it.

I will be waiting for your comments guys, and i hope this one has been very useful.

Article Marketer

My Number One SEO Tool

As you well know, comments are one of the most important element of blogging, and bloggers love to see their articles commented. But, think a little. Who will try to leave a comment if you commenting areas are boring ? Try to make them more enjoyable, to encourage more people to comment and to return to your blog to check if they receive any replies.

1. Visual Text Editor

As i’ve told you before, the default comments field is very boring and quite limited. Don’t worry, this can be fixed with NicEdit (30kb in size) which is a full featured text editor. Using this plugin is a lot much easier to format a comment, so don’t hessitate to use it.

2. Subscribe To Comments

Subscribing to comments lets you keep track of the most important ones. The best part is that it’s a good way to bring people back to your blog, to check if they received a reply to their comments. Subscribe to Comments plugin can be found here.

3. Post Comments Via AJAX

AJAX allows the comment to be posted without reloading, and that is a good thing because it save time. Oh, and this plugin will also give the commenters the chance to head off to other pages on your blog before they get bored.

4. List Recent Comments

A sidebar widget listing the latest comments on your blog can be a good way of showing that your blog is alive, but also that you take the time to interact with your readers. Download it from here.

5. Add User Avatars

A single comment can get lost quite easily so it’s best to use avatars add distinction between individual comments. This plugin will also give you a little smile on your lips when you start seeing faces you recognise. Use : MBLA (for Wordpress users).

I hope this tips will help you a lot in increasing your blog comments.