10 Reasons to Put RSS on Your Site!

RSS and Blogs are the topics of the moment. Seems like everyone is talking about it. Granted, there is too much hype about RSS and Blogs.

But where there's hype - there's interest!

And with good reason - RSS is posed to be the break out technology of 2005. Those who don't take full advantage of it will be left behind.

If you need convincing - here are 10 reasons why you should put RSS on your site:

1. It's easy and fast! Not to mention Free! You can use a free service like eBlogger and publish your Blog and RSS feed within minutes. You can even place or publish your Blog/RSS Feed on your own site without knowing 'html' or 'xml'. It's all done for you!

Repeat - it's simple to use and very convenient. Publishing your blog is only a few clicks away. (If you need help - just use the link at the end of this article.)

2. Syndicate Your Content. RSS stands for 'really simple syndication' and it's just another way of passing along your information. With the popularity of 'MyYahoo' and the 'Firefox' browser (which has a built-in RSS feed reader) - syndicating your content has gotten even simpler.

The next version of Windows is reportly scheduled to have a RSS feature. If this happens - RSS will explode.

3. Get Your Content Indexed. Using blogs to publish your content is a neat way of side stepping the regular indexing procedure. It gets your content indexed very quickly in most of the search engines.

Search Engines are constantly on the lookout for 'fresh content' - these 'link rich' blogs are a good source of this content. Because blogs are on specific topics - they have a concentrated source of good quality informational material to serve up!

4. Instant Contact. Blogs give you instant contact with your readers or viewers. We live in an 'instant' society - we want everything five minutes ago. Blogs provide this instant gratification. Readers or viewers using MyYahoo have an instant link to your information or postings.

RSS Feeds will instantly spread your information to all interested parties - bringing in targeted traffic.

5. Building Your List. People who pick up your RSS feed or add you to their MyYahoo site - become your subscribers. You are really building your contact list. Have a popular blog or RSS Feed and you can build a large targeted contact list very quickly.

It might not replace your old opt-in email list - but it can be a lucrative addition to it! Take advantage of all those targeted contacts.

6. Link Building. Blogs are link heavens! Build your links thru blogs. All these links will boost your link popularity and increase your search engine rankings.

Plus, by giving viewers/readers a way of adding your RSS Feed creates targeted links to your site. This reason alone is why your site should have RSS!

7. Viewer/Subscriber Feedback. Instant feedback from your subscribers or viewers is easy with blogs. Creating trust and credibility is so much easier when there is immediate communication between the two parties.

8. Keyword Content Building. Blogs are especially good for building 'keyword targeted content' for your site. All these links will boost your keyword rankings in the search engines. Google places a high value on 'anchor text' and blogs are a good place to put all those links.

You can also start different blogs targeted at 'specific related keywords' covering the major topics of your site. Again, search engines love related keyword linking so you can boost your site's rankings by using blogs.

9. Monetize Your Content. Blogs are an excellent way of monetizing your content. Blog sites like Eblogger (owned by Google) even encourages you to use the 'adsense code' in your blogs. If you have a popular blog - this may bring in extra income.

Plus, publishing your ezine or newsletter in a blog can bring in revenue for months if not years to come. All those affiliate links and product promotions get indexed by the search engines and become accessible to a wider audience, i.e. market.

10. Because Everyone Else is Doing It! Might sound a bit 'Jonesish' but you do have to keep up with what other web sites are doing. To remain competitive - you MUST put RSS on your site.

Sites without the 'AddtoMyYahoo' link or the 'xml' button will be the exception rather than the rule in just a few years - if not months. It's simply another way of getting your information 'out there'. It's an opportunity and advantage that you cannot afford to miss.

Proceed without RSS at your own risk!

About the Author :- To add RSS to your Site within minutes - check out this simple RSS Report and Guide. Titus Hoskins of bizwaremagic.com. Visit http://www.bizwaremagic.com for more simple solutions to your online marketing tasks.

How To Add Random RSS Content To Your Site

Most savvy internet marketers will know how important it is to have fresh content added to their sites on a daily basis but the problem sometimes is to find the time and/or content. Adding an RSS feed is a good way to add fresh content to a site, but the problem again is that most of them only get updated on a weekly basis.

I have been wracking my brains trying to find a semi- automated way to do this to make my life a little bit easier. The search engines are always looking for fresh content - adding random RSS feeds seemed to be the answer!

So I did so some searches on the Internet to see what is available. A search for "add random content to site" sure enough brought up a bevy of links - most of which went to sites that wanted to sell me their products for hundreds of dollars!

Having been on the Internet for quite a while I know by now that most of the information that is on sale can most times be found with just a little bit of work. So I refined my searches somewhat and I found a gem that I would like to share with you for…. You guessed it - free! It will take a bit of work from your side to tweak the script a bit, but it's worth it, right?

First you will have to head over to: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/randomiframe.htm and copy the available java script. This displays a little content box 130x130. Go on, before they decide to start selling it!

Paste the script into your favourite editor and make the following changes:

To change it to display your content you will have to make the box a little bigger. To achieve that you have to change this piece of code:

width=130 height=130

I have mine set to width=500 height=800 but you should change it to fit your content. Play around with it a bit and change the width or height where necessary. If you do not want a frame around your content, change this piece of code:

frameborder="1" to frameborder="0

To display your content, you will have to create html pages for it. For now, just create a blank html page, I will show you later where to get the content for it.

As you can see, the script calls the pages like this:

randomcontent[0]="random1.htm" - change the "random" to whatever you want to call your created html page - e.g. successstory1.htm.

You can basically display unlimited pages with this script. To add more pages to display, just add:

e.g. randomcontent[4]="random5.htm", randomcontent[5]="random6.htm " etc.

You can now add the script to any page that you want to display random content on.

To get free rss content to rotate, head on over to http://www.goarticles.com They also have literally thousands of free articles that you can use for fresh content on your site. Add the code for the rss scripts to the blank html pages that you have created (or an article if you so prefer) then upload all your pages to your server.

Make sure that the page that you are calling them from (the page with the randomizer java script) and your content pages are in the same directory, otherwise you will have to change the path to the pages in the java script code!

If you would like to get more rss feeds, just do a search for "free rss feeds" on any of the search engines.

So, there you have it. Randomized rss content for your site without having to pay a cent.

Enjoy your fresh content and the increased traffic!

About the Author :- Joan Masterson is the owner of http://www.womenatwork.co.za - a site that offers free work at home resources and information

How to Use an RSS Feed to Provide Content for Your Website

Search engines love websites that are continuously updated with fresh content. As a website owner, if you want to achieve or maintain a good search engine ranking, then your goal should be to continually provide updated keyword–based content on a regular basis to your website. Naturally, if you're providing the content yourself, this takes a lot of work. Let me show you how you can get fresh, keyword-based content updated on your site on a daily basis with no work on your part using RSS feeds and PHP, and most of all, the search engines will love it!

RSS is an acronym that is short for Really Simple Syndication. It's a type of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that is used for syndicating content. XML is used to describe data and is basically a markup language – like HTML.

Before I go into the list of items that are needed to make all of this work, I will mention that the details outlined in this article apply to websites that support PHP. PHP is a popular server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic website content. If your website is running on a Unix-based operating system (like Linux), chances are your web server supports the PHP scripting language. Check with your web host to be sure.

Now, I can make this a long drawn out article on the technical details behind RSS, XML and PHP, but that would result in a boring article that hardly anyone would read! Instead, I'll just layout the necessary details for an entrepreneurial minded individual to setup a website using these technologies in a quick and least confusing fashion, I hope.

Task: Let's say we run a website on gardening and we want to use an RSS feed to add changing content to our site on a regular basis without us having to do any work.

Our goal is to make this new content readable by the search engine spiders. In order to do that, the content needs to be returned via server-side scripting – not client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript). This is a mistake that a lot of websites that use RSS make.

You see, JavaScript is executed by the client; PHP is executed on the web server. When a search engine spider comes across a JavaScript 'script' tag, it stops spidering until it moves beyond the closing 'script' tag. On the other hand, PHP converts the script to HTML on the web server and sends the results back to the client (browser). So when a search engine spider comes across a web page that uses RSS with PHP, the spider only 'sees' the returned HTML – as if the PHP script were never there. So, PHP with RSS is definitely the route to take for SEO conscious website owners.

Here's what we need to accomplish our task:
1) An RSS feed link
2) An RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML
3) An HTML output-template

Getting an RSS feed link...

A good place to start looking for an RSS feed is 2rrs.com, where you can execute an 'RSS Search' for the keyword 'gardening'. You'll likely see a bunch of results. Click on any of them. You'll now find an RSS2HTML link under the 'Details' section - which is your RSS feed link. Copy the full HTTP path to this link; we will need it for configuration in later steps.

Now we need to get an RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML, and we also need an HTML output-template…

So, we need a method to take our RSS feed and convert it into HTML so we can insert it into our web page. The best way to do this is to use an awesome little PHP script called rss2html.php.

You can download this script here: http://www.feedforall.com/more-php.htm (Choose Option two -> Download)

Unzip the download file and you'll find a sample HTML output-template file called sample-template.html and an rss2html.php file. These files will eventually need to be moved to your web server, but before you do that, let's configure everything...

The PHP file is the work horse and does the RSS XML to HTML conversion, so there are some configuration settings within this file that need to be set. Open the file in a regular text editor (like Word Pad) and make the following 3 configuration changes:

Configuration change #1:
Find the following line of code: $XMLfilename = "sample.xml"; Change it to: $XMLfilename = "Your-RSS-Feed-Link";

The above line of code tells the PHP script where to get your RSS XML feed (file). Remember, the RSS XML feed contains the content which you are trying to add to your website. The website that you get your RSS feed from will update this feed as new content becomes available from the website. (Note: be sure not to download the XML file and specify a local path to it – this will result in your website always using the same XML file – which means your website will not be updated with new content from the RSS XML source.)

Configuration change #2:
Find the following line of code: $TEMPLATEfilename = "sample-template.html"; Insert your HTML output-template name in place of sample-template.html.

The rss2html.zip that you downloaded from the feedforall link above comes with a sample-template.html that you can use. However, the template from feedforall encompasses the entire HTML code for the entire webpage (from the opening 'html' tag to the closing 'html' tag). If you're inserting this content into your pre-existing webpage, then you'll likely only want to use the HTML code between the opening 'table' tag and the closing 'table' tag. This will allow you to insert a table into your webpage where each row represents an article from your RSS XML feed source.

Configuration change #3:
Find the following line of code: $FeedMaxItems = 10000;

The number '10000' above represents the number of items that you want to retrieve from the RSS feed – which works out to be the number of rows in your HTML table from the previous step. You can leave this setting as is, or you can change it to any positive number your like. For example, if you change it to 5, then the PHP script will display the top 5 RSS feed articles from your RSS feed source.

When you're done with these configuration settings you can upload these files to your scripts directory on your web server and add the following line of code to your website's HTML file where you would like the RSS feed content to appear:

include ('path_to_scripts_directory/rss2html.php');

Make sure to prefix the above line of code with a 'less-than' symbol followed by a question mark, as well as, postfix it with a question mark followed by a 'greater-than' symbol. Also, remember, if your webpage was initially an html file (i.e. filename.html) then you will want to change it to filename.php in order for the web server to know how to handle the above PHP script.

There you go... an easy way to add changing content to your website without any extra work on your part.

About the Author :- Michael Ellis is an Internet technology expert that specializes in marketing products and services online. Be sure to visit Michael's website http://www.VictoryKey.com for FREE Internet Marketing articles, tips and discussion forums . Want a quality website critique? Simply post a request in Michael's Internet Marketing Forum to get a valuable review of your website.

Newsletters VS RSS Feeds

Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the purpose of your newsletter

It is my contention that some publishers, and most especially email publishers, are marketers first and publishers second. That means they see making sales as the primary purpose of publishing an ezine or newsletter. We all hope that our publications will achieve that goal, but it should not be the primary purpose of your publication. Instead, your publication should focus on providing content of the highest quality that establishes your credibility. You do that by showing your readers that you know your stuff, that you are, dare I use the word, an expert - a real expert - in your field.

This means you need to do as much writing of your own as possible. Yes, I realize that writing articles is hard work and time-consuming. That is why we publishers use third-party articles. but don't just run any article that you receive. Use some discrimination. Use only articles that complement your own content, that are appropriate to the focus of your own newsletter. And, whatever you do, do not just publish the article as is. Write a short introduction that gives your readers your own thoughts on the article. Remember, you want to establish your reputation, your credibility, not someone else's.

The received wisdom is that newsletters should be used to promote your own products and services. If you look at the vast majority of email newsletters, that is exactly what the publishers seem to think is the purpose of their newsletter. In most, including a lot of the most-well known, newsletters, you can hardly find the content among all the advertising. these publishers seem to feel the need to shove their advertising in your face. However, let's look at what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper. Most newspapers do not cram every page of their publications with so many ads that you cannot find the articles. Most of the good ones tend to have a separate section for advertising. And what ads do appear in the content sections are presented in such a way that they do not interfere with the presentation of the news. How long do you think your local paper would keep its subscribers if they overloaded the news pages with ads? It's time we online publishers changed the way we think. We need to get away from the newsletter-as-vehicle-for-advertising model and switch to a newsletter-as-vehicle-for-quality-content model. Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the design of your newsletter.

Email publishers tend to publish discrete issues of their newsletters on a regular schedule. The most common schedule is once a week. Each issue contains all the information that publisher wants to communicate to his or her subscribers for that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format, beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as her delivery system.
The first drawback is the length. With a couple of articles and a half dozen or so classified ads, along with the regular information like the welcome, the disclaimers required with email, the unsubscribe information, etc., that makes for a fairly long message. Most Internet users just don't read messages of that length.

Yes, you could send out more frequent shorter messages, but that only compounds the problems associated with email delivery exponentially. The more often you email your subscribers, the more likely you are of getting shut down because of a spam complaint.
By using a weblog type of format, you do not do discrete issues. Rather you post an article or your advertising or an editorial on any given day. Let's say on Monday, you post an article about RSS publishing, then on Tuesday you publish an editorial about the upcoming election, on Wednesday, you publish a couple of classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article on holiday advertising and on Friday you publish a few more ads. Let's say this is the same content you would have published in a discrete issue, except for the disclaimers and the mast head - the stuff at the top that identifies your newsletter, You do not need to publish the mast head because it is always there on your blog. You do not need to include all the email disclaimers because you are not using email. Things like advertising disclaimers and welcome messages can be integrated into the overall design of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Anyone going to your blog page will see them every time they visit.

Yes, even though you are using RSS as your delivery system for your newsletter, your newsletter will have an HTML page as well that your readers will visit whenever they read an entire item in your newsletter.

You see, the RSS feed will only carry the title as a link and the first paragraph or two of your item, say the article about RSS publishing. Each item will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will hold up to fifteen items, the last fifteen items you posted. Any good RSS publishing system will set all this up for you and do all the necessary coding changes. Usually you post your item in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you. Doing it all manually is not effective or efficient, so I suggest you not do that! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier not harder. More on these systems later on.
With the better publishing systems you do not even have to know a lot of HTML because they will allow you to post your item as text and it will format the line breaks for you. As long as you put a double hard break at the end of each paragraph of text, your article will look fine. You can add bold or italics or underlines as needed. But, the better your HTML skills, the more creative you can be in how your posts will look.

Also, if you have the necessary expertise and tools, you can add graphics, Flash, audio, video, or anything else you want to jazz up your pages. Do NOT add executables (EXE) files to your posts. That creates all kinds of problems for your readers and is forbidden by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also, if you add multimedia to your newsletter, I strongly recommend you do in a way so that your reader can choose to view it or not. Not only is that the courteous thing to do, but it also will prevent you from locking up your reader's computer. Although most people have fairly sophisticated computers these days, there are still people who might not be able to or do not want to view these kinds of files. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.
Doing daily posts, which I consider the ideal schedule, may seem like a lot more work, but, in reality and once you get the hang of it, it really is less time consuming than doing one big issue a week. Also, a lot of email publishers have gone back to doing text-based newsletters to avoid some of the filtering of email that is going on. HTML email is often blocked or the HTML is disabled unless you specifically ask to see it.

Text newsletters are dull and boring. The Internet is a visual medium first and foremost. Yes, it is for the transmission of content, but that content has to be visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing appealing about a long text message that uses rows of unimaginative characters like #,@, * or others to try to add some zest to all that text. If you want to keep your readers, yes, provide them with lots of great content, but also present that content in a way that captures their imaginations.
Finally, there is a very strong marketing reason for using a blog type of format. I will only touch on it briefly here and explain it in detail in my next blog on marketing with RSS.

You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get new people to see your newsletter, right? That means getting traffic to your newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do that is to get the search engines like Google to spider your newsletter every time you add a new item to your weblog. What would you say if I told you there was a marketing tool that could do that? It's called pinging weblogs.com... more about it in my next blog!

How does one become an Internet marketing guru? In the case of Doug Champigny, it took almost 30 years... Starting as a reporter/photographer in the early 70's, he soon realized the real money was in advertising - and made the switch as quickly as possible! After stints as advertising manager of various print publications, Champigny jumped to the Advertising Agency arena, founding two retail agencies over the years... Fascinated by the mass-communication potential of the fledgeling Internet, Champigny took a 2 year sabbatical in the 80's, returning to college to study computer programming full time, joining the online 'geek' community in 1982. How the 'Net has changed since then!

About the Author :- Returning to the advertising industry, Champigny founded The Cyber Surfer in 1993 as a retail advertising 'boutique', creating print, radio and TV campaigns for local and national accounts while monitoring the growth of the World Wide Web. By 1996 the decision was made to switch the agency's focus from traditional media to the Web, and Champigny's never looked back!

Using RSS Feeds to Market a Poker Affiliate Program

RSS, otherwise known as "Really Simple Syndication" is a file format that is used by webmasters to syndicate content on the internet. As a poker affiliate, you can use the power of RSS to make your web content available to other webmasters instantly and doing so can be a tremendous source of traffic.

So what exactly is RSS? Basically RSS is a mini-database containing both headlines and descriptions of your articles. Also included is a hyperlink that allows readers to visit your site in order to read the article in full.

Over the last few years, RSS as become more and more popular and is now being used by a record number of webmasters to add fresh, updated content to websites. Tapping into the powerful world of RSS is quick and the easiest way to do so is through the use of blogs.

Blog software platforms come with built in RSS feeds that will automatically update when you've added new content to your site.

Once you have and RSS feed, readers will be able to simply plug your feed URL into an RSS reader or aggregator which will be updated automatically when you add new content to your site. RSS readers simply hold a collection of feeds that the user enters in. There are 3 types of RSS feed aggregators:

· Desktop RSS readers - Desktop RSS readers are simply applications that run on an individual's computer. They run in the background and update automatically whenever new information is published.

· Web based aggregators - Online aggregators are server side and allow users to login and monitor their RSS feeds from any computer.

· Plug-in aggregators/readers - Browser plugins allow feeds to be read from inside an existing program.

As a poker affiliate, RSS will aid your marketing efforts in the following areas:

· E-mail marketing 
 · Search engine marketing (SEO)
 · Blogging
 · Advertising
 · Public relations (PR)
 · Branding

I urge you to add RSS to your mix of poker affiliate promotion tools today. It is an easy and sure-fire way to boost traffic and generate additional real money sign ups. Happy marketing!

About the Author :- Learn how to become a super poker affiliate by promoting the best poker affiliate programs at http://www.epokeraffiliate.com/

Feed The Need: 5 Ways To Use RSS To Boost Your Business Or Organizational Success

RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things) is a relatively new technology that allows anyone who creates frequently changing web content - news, blogs, current events, etc. - to deliver their messages to interested readers with no fuss, no muss and best of all - no spam!

Currently, RSS is being used by content-rich sites (mainly blogs and news centers) to keep readers up-to-date on newly published posts or breaking stories. But RSS can do so much more. Many businesses and organizations are failing to truly exploit the amazing properties of this technology - and in doing so are leaving on the table innumerable opportunities to create even greater value, sales and traffic for their company, product or service and the market share it represents. Below are just a few of the creative ways that businesses and other groups can tap into the power of RSS and create new streams of revenue and interest for their organizations.

1. Create An "Announcements And Special Offers" Feed

If your business offers classes, seminars, products, services, specials, sales - essentially anything that changes, updates or rotates throughout a cycle - then creating a dedicated RSS feed could save you (and your clients) time and money. By creating an "Announcements and Special Offers" feed and offering access to your clients as an alternative to emails and print mailers, you can keep your client base up to speed, plus send out limited-time and exclusive "feed only" special offers and discounts, thereby offering an incentive to "get on board." This not only saves you time by reducing the advertising cycle to the time it takes to update your web page/feed, it saves your clients money by enabling them to quickly scan through the offering headings and pick out just the one's they're interested in - while your savings on the cost and time of paper and digital mailings (with their appallingly low conversion rates and sporadic delivery) progressively increase as the feed readership segment of your client base grows.

2. Create A "Client of the Week" Feed

If you're in a business where this sort of recognition is appropriate, then this could be a big hit! Creating a feed that regularly highlights a different client, their business and any special offers that they might like to make available - exclusively to other feed members, of course - can be a great value-add for your clients, one that costs you little more than the few minutes it takes to create the "spot" and publish it on your site/feed. Include a photo and a business link and your clients will be singing your praises far and wide!

3. Create A Training Or Team Feed

If you are part of a network marketing venture or are in charge of a large sales force or other team and need a way to consistently and continually get training aids, updates, incentives, sales copy, goals, meeting agendas and other items to your downline or members, consider setting up a feed just to serve this function. Since the actual content is hosted at one central site (subscribers only receive a "teaser" that they have to click through to get the full message), you can upload any digital file of any size that you need at the site itself and be assured that everyone who gets the message will be able to retrieve the files - not always a sure thing when dealing with email attachments and text messaging.

4. Create an inter-office feed

Memos, presentation materials, files, announcements, new policies, schedules - all this can be gathered up in one central feed (or broken down into departmental feeds) that are then easily maintained in one central archive and easily accessible by anyone who needs them. Nobody is left behind or out of the loop because they didn't check their email (or because the message got filtered or bounced) and everyone gets just the information they need without dealing with a lot of cross-over communication from people replying and clarifying.

5. Schools, non-profits and other organizations - RSS works for you too!

Schools - Consider the possibilities of a student feed, updated with activities, exam dates, school closings, special "student only" offers from local businesses and so on. Or how about a special assignment feed in which class materials are uploaded by each instructor for students who are ill, away from home or otherwise unable to be in class?

Churches - A congregational feed can supply daily meditations, worship service schedules, prayer requests, special events and other such messages right to your congregant's desktop - a sort of ongoing, rolling newsletter that never has to wait for a full page or go out off-schedule due to mised deadlines (items go out as they come in - it's that simple). This could also be accessed by members who are doing missionary work overseas, to help them feel more connected with home and to allow them to contribute by sending in updates of their work to be added to the general feed.

Non-profits - Volunteer feeds could provide a running update of available positions and work needed, as well as featuring profiles of special volunteers and organizational wish lists; fundraising feeds might keep donors abreast of giving events and how their donations are being used; and inter-organizational feeds can keep board members and other involved parties up to date on meeting times, agendas and projects. All great ways of utilizing the powers of RSS for the common good!

Consider these options the next time you need to get information out to a scattered and diverse readership, or need to publish material that never seems to come in when you need it to. RSS is a new technology, surely. But that just means that it's true power to serve your needs is only now being discovered. One of the best ways to keep ahead of the crowd is to forge a path through new territories. Where will RSS lead you?

(c) Soni Pitts

About the Author :- Soni Pitts is the Chief Visionary Butt-Kicker of SoniPitts.Com . She specializes in helping others reclaim "soul proprietorship" in their lives and to begin living the life their Creator always intended for them. She is the author of the free e-book "50 Ways To Reach Your Goals" and over 100 self-help and inspirational articles, as well as other products and resources designed to facilitate this process of personal growth and spiritual development.