Put An RSS Feed On Your Website

There's a new kid in Internet-town. Actually, this kid has been around for a couple of years, but the buzz is starting to pick up. The kid's name? RSS.

Why Should I Care About RSS?

Well, RSS is a very cool way of distributing information about your website, like new additions or updates. Most of the major websites out there have RSS feeds for their content. All the news services have it. They publish all their news stories in various RSS feeds in addition to having the stories on their websites.

The story goes that about 5% of Internet users know what RSS is and use it. That, apparently, is a whopping 46 million people!

The Major Benefit of RSS

An RSS feed allows people to stay up-to-date with their favorite topics, like the topic of your website, without them having to give away their email address by subscribing to a newsletter. In our current SPAM-filled lives that is a major benefit!

I can hear you thinking, "But I want their email address to build my user database!" Yes, I understand that. I'm not saying you should dump your email collection efforts.

I do however believe many more people will happily subscribe to your RSS feed, but may be hesitant to give you their email address. This way you can build a bigger loyal user base. As your user base builds, odds are that many of your RSS users will eventually take some or other action that lets you have their email address anyway.

So What Is RSS Really?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In reality an RSS feed is merely an XML file, hosted on your website, that contains news items for your website.

It's not just any XML file. It follows the RSS specification. There are a couple of RSS specifications, but the latest is RSS 2.0. (There are also other formats like Atom, but RSS 2.0 is widely used.)

The file will contain the title, description, and publish date of your RSS feed. It will also contain one or more items. Each item has a title, description, link to the full article on your site, and the publish date of the item. The RSS 2.0 specification allows for more information, but these are the basic required elements.

So you can see that an RSS feed is easy to provide on your website. It provides extra value to your website's audience, and can help to build a loyal user base.

My next article will be on exactly how to create your RSS feed, put it on your site, and how to make the world aware of it...

Theme-based Websites?

The other day someone raised the question, "Are theme-based websites really that important for search engines?"

This got me thinking and I tried to find out what others had to say about it.

If you don't know what a theme-based website is, it is a website focused on a particular theme, and all pages are related to that theme. If I had a theme-based website on "widgets", I might have a page focused on "green widgets", and another on "blue widgets", and so on.

Some people say that such a theme-based site is ranked higher by search engines because all of the content supports the same theme.

When I first wrote this article, from what I was able to find out, this is not quite true. I was told that search engines don't regard an entire website as more important merely because all its content revolves around the same theme. Since then I have learnt that the opposite is true... they do look at the theme.

It is true that search engines look at each page on its own. If your page's title, keywords, and description indicate that the page is about "blue widgets", and the body content of the page clearly indicates to search engines that this is a page about blue widgets, the search engines will rate the page higher when someone is searching for blue widgets.

So if you now go along and build similar pages for green, yellow, and orange widgets, you'll have 4 good pages about widgets. Each will be regarded as a good page on its own, and as I have now discovered, it also says that the whole website is a great widgets-site.

Search engines like Google definitely evaluate each page on its own, but they also look at surrounding pages to create a context within which to evaluate the page, i.e. they use the content of each page to determine what the site is about. If all pages support the same theme, they all get ranked a little higher.

The next question now is, "If I add a few pages to my widgets-site that talk about monsters, will that hurt my site?"

Probably not too much, as long the bulk of your pages support the theme, but if you have lots of information on monsters that you want to publish, you're better off creating a second website and making "monsters" its theme.

So, contrary to what I said here before, theme-based websites are good. If you're going to build a website, stick to a theme.

Starting an eBay business

On Thanksgiving a friend told me that she was in the process of starting an eBay business.

She then told me about this company (I won't mention their name) that she signed up with. She did some seminar through them where they were supposed to teach her all she needed to know. Part of this "package" is also an ecommerce website that she's supposed to set up, and some coaching that's supposed to help her get it all done. She wouldn't tell me the exact amount, but she spoke about "several thousand dollars", so I assume she paid them $3,000 to $5,000. She was quite upset about how much she had to pay and how little she was getting in return.

I was appalled!

Nobody should pay that much to start an eBay business. You can go out and buy a "Dummies" book that will tell you all the basics of starting an eBay business for about $25.

Since I had looked into starting an eBay business myself before, I knew I had some good information at home that I could pass on to her. I promised to send it to her as soon as I got home.

After I sent her the ebook, it dawned on me that there are probably lots of people out there who would love to start an eBay business, but aren't very sure of how to go about it.

So I decided to make the ebook freely available for download and hopefully stop a few people from spending a lot of money on something that should really be cheap and fairly easy to do.

If you are such a person that would like to start an eBay business, download Make Your Net Auction Sell.

Read this book. It contains lots of good information that will help you get started.

Remember though, this is not some "magic pill" that will help you get rich quick - those don't exist. You have to read the book and then take action for it to work!

Good luck!


PS. It is a "zip" file - a file that is compressed to save on download time. You'll need a product like WinZip to unzip it, or if you have Windows XP, you should be able to unzip it by simply double-clicking on it.

PPS. Don't worry, I'm not violating any copyright by allowing you to download it for free! You can pass it on to your friends too!

Smart Web Marketing

Web marketing fascinates me. Like so many other things, it can be done really well or really badly. Those who do it well, prosper. Those who don't...

There is of course a difference between marketing value products well and scamming people into buying junk. I want to focus here on good honest marketing... something that I can feel proud of... something that will have value to you.

So I intend to write articles on honest, smart web marketing strategies and tools that I come across.

Bookmark my blog and come back regularly to see what new stuff I've found.

All the best.